SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF PEOPLE’S ACCEPTANCE TOWARDS THE NEW MALAYSIAN GOVERNMENT USING NAÏVE BAYES METHOD

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is a field of research that has a significant impact on today’s nations, politics and businesses. It is an algorithmic process to comprehend the opinions of a given subject based on the Natural Language Processing (NLP) methodologies. It has received much attention in recent years and is proven vital in various fields, e.g., online product reviews and social media analysis (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). This paper reports the outcome of sentiment analysis to investigate people’s acceptance of Pakatan Harapan, as the new Malaysian government, spearheaded by Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad and Dr. Wan Azizah, with an influence of Dato Seri Anwar Ibrahim. The objective is to classify tweets into three types of sentiments; positive, neutral and negative using Naïve Bayes method which is readily available in Python. The first step is tweets extraction for a month (March to April 2019) using search queries: {Pakatan Harapan, Mahathir, Anwar Ibrahim, Wan Azizah}. It is followed by tweets wrangling using NLP library and lastly output visualization in the form of a word cloud. A word cloud is a visual representation of text data with various font sizes depending on its probabilities. Final results showed that the tweets related to new government consist of neutral sentiment (41%) followed by positive sentiment (30%) and negative sentiment (29%). Malaysians do prefer the new government. However careful mitigation steps must be crafted to overcome controversial issues such as the ‘Rome Statute’ to avoid negative digital footprint, hence winning the Malaysians’ heart.