Social Media Sentiment Research Articles

Information Extraction and Named Entity Recognition Supported Social Media Sentiment Analysis during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Social media platforms are increasingly being used to communicate information, something which has only intensified during the pandemic. News portals and governments are also increasing attention to digital communications, announcements and response or reaction monitoring. Twitter, as one of the largest social networking sites, which has become even more important in the communication of information during the pandemic, provides space for a lot of different opinions and news, with many discussions as well. In this paper, we look at the sentiments of people and we use tweets to determine how people have related to COVID-19 over a given period of time. These sentiment analyses are augmented with information extraction and named entity recognition to get an even more comprehensive picture. The sentiment analysis is based on the ’Bidirectional encoder representations from transformers’ (BERT) model, which is the basic measurement model for the comparisons. We consider BERT as the baseline and compare the results with the RNN, NLTK and TextBlob sentiment analyses. The RNN results are significantly closer to the benchmark results given by BERT, both models are able to categorize all tweets without a single tweet fall into the neutral category. Then, via a deeper analysis of these results, we can get an even more concise picture of people’s emotional state in the given period of time. The data from these analyses further support the emotional categories, and provide a deeper understanding that can provide a solid starting point for other disciplines as well, such as linguistics or psychology. Thus, the sentiment analysis, supplemented with information extraction and named entity recognition analyses, can provide a supported and deeply explored picture of specific sentiment categories and user attitudes.

COVID-19 and Tourism: Analyzing the Effects of COVID-19 Statistics and Media Coverage on Attitudes toward Tourism

COVID-19 has significantly influenced tourism, including tourists’ and residents’ attitudes toward tourism. At the same time, attitudes and consumer confidence are important for economic recovery in the tourism sector. This study explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s attitudes toward tourism by analyzing time-series data on the number of COVID-19 positive cases, vaccinations, news sentiment, a total number of daily mentions of tourism, and the share of voice for positive and negative sentiment toward tourism. The applied data analysis techniques include descriptive analysis, visual representation of data, data decomposition into trend and cycle components, unit root tests, Granger causality test, and multiple time series regression. The results demonstrate that the COVID-19 statistics and media coverage have significant effects on interest in tourism in general, as well as the positive and negative sentiment toward tourism. The results contribute to knowledge and practice by describing the effects of the disease statistics on attitudes toward tourism, introducing social media sentiment analysis as an opportunity to measure positive and negative sentiment toward tourism, and providing recommendations for government authorities, destination management organizations, and tourism providers.

Social Media Analysis for Investigating Consumer Sentiment on Mobile Banking

This paper is aimed to give more insight for Indonesian banks to understand consumers’ sentiment in social media towards their mobile banking service, determining area(s) that requires improvement, and giving recommendation where refinement is due. Nine highly mentioned mobile banking features in Indonesian language are determined through manual observation on Twitter, translated as: payment, block, open new bank account, login, transaction report, bank balance, top-up, transaction, and transfer. Twitter entries from January 1 st , 2019 to December 31 st , 2020 which include the words ‘mobile banking’, ‘m-banking’, or ‘ mbanking ’ plus one of the nine features are collected and classified according to their sentiment. In total, 5014 tweet data are collected. Negative tweets have the biggest proportion at 49.8%, followed by neutral tweets with 44.5% and positive tweets with 5.7% only. Proportion of negative tweets are way higher than the positive tweets for all nine features. From highly mentioned words and representative example tweets, some preferred features can be derived, including no extra fee to access any mobile banking feature, providing record that can be recalled after important transactions, keeping mobile banking app updated to customer needs while also maintaining steadiness, speed, and ease-of-use, along with better synchronization with third party entities.

Wearable IoT intelligent recommender framework for a smarter healthcare approach

PurposeThe increase in the number of healthcare wearable (Internet of Things) IoT options is making it difficult for individuals, healthcare experts and physicians to find the right smart device that best matches their requirements or treatments. The purpose of this research is to propose a framework for a recommender system to advise on the best device for the patient using machine learning algorithms and social media sentiment analysis. This approach will provide great value for patients, doctors, medical centers, and hospitals to enable them to provide the best advice and guidance in allocating the device for that particular time in the treatment process.Design/methodology/approachThis data-driven approach comprises multiple stages that lead to classifying the diseases that a patient is currently facing or is at risk of facing by using and comparing the results of various machine learning algorithms. Hereupon, the proposed recommender framework aggregates the specifications of wearable IoT devices along with the image of the wearable product, which is the extracted user perception shared on social media after applying sentiment analysis. Lastly, a proposed computation with the use of a genetic algorithm was used to compute all the collected data and to recommend the wearable IoT device recommendation for a patient.FindingsThe proposed conceptual framework illustrates how health record data, diseases, wearable devices, social media sentiment analysis and machine learning algorithms are interrelated to recommend the relevant wearable IoT devices for each patient. With the consultation of 15 physicians, each a specialist in their area, the proof-of-concept implementation result shows an accuracy rate of up to 95% using 17 settings of machine learning algorithms over multiple disease-detection stages. Social media sentiment analysis was computed at 76% accuracy. To reach the final optimized result for each patient, the proposed formula using a Genetic Algorithm has been tested and its results presented.Research limitations/implicationsThe research data were limited to recommendations for the best wearable devices for five types of patient diseases. The authors could not compare the results of this research with other studies because of the novelty of the proposed framework and, as such, the lack of available relevant research.Practical implicationsThe emerging trend of wearable IoT devices is having a significant impact on the lifestyle of people. The interest in healthcare and well-being is a major driver of this growth. This framework can help in accelerating the transformation of smart hospitals and can assist doctors in finding and suggesting the right wearable IoT for their patients smartly and efficiently during treatment for various diseases. Furthermore, wearable device manufacturers can also use the outcome of the proposed platform to develop personalized wearable devices for patients in the future.Originality/valueIn this study, by considering patient health, disease-detection algorithm, wearable and IoT social media sentiment analysis, and healthcare wearable device dataset, we were able to propose and test a framework for the intelligent recommendation of wearable and IoT devices helping healthcare professionals and patients find wearable devices with a better understanding of their demands and experiences.

Examining the effects of news and media sentiments on volatility and correlation: Evidence from the UK

This paper examines the effect of news and social media sentiments on the stock and bond market volatility and their dynamic return correlation over the period 1998−2017. A principal component analysis is used to construct sentiment variables. Results indicate that news sentiments have more pronounced effects on volatility while social media show stronger impacts on the correlation. These sentiments also exhibit strong and significant reflections on volatility persistence. Furthermore, result show economically different impacts of some sentiments across different market states. Finally, an extended model with news sentiments performs better in forecasting returns than the basic and social media ones.

Application of the Vector Machine Support Method in Twitter Social Media Sentiment Analysis Regarding the Covid-19 Vaccine Issue in Indonesia

According to the Indonesian government, Indonesia has been afflicted by Covid-19 since March 2, 2020. Numerous countries, including Indonesia, have made efforts, but with the spread of perceptions, rumors, and a flood of information into the society regarding vaccines, there are both advantages and disadvantages to vaccines. government-led immunization campaigns. As a result, it is vital to examine public sentiment toward the government's immunization programs. The goal of this study is to ascertain the emotion toward the Covid-19 vaccination in Indonesia based on the classification results. The Support Vector Machine classification technique was employed in this investigation (SVM). The SVM classification method was chosen because it possesses the ability to generalize when it comes to identifying a pattern, excluding the data used in the method's learning phase. Classification with an SVM linear kernel and TF-IDF weighting, as well as data sharing via K-fold cross validation with a value of k=10. Positive and negative classifications are made. Following preprocessing and classification, we determined the f1 values, accuracy, precision, and recall to use as reference values when evaluating the classification. SVM performed well in classifying the data in this investigation, with f1 = 88.7%, accuracy = 84.4%, precision = 86.2%, and recall = 97%. This value is acceptable, and hence SVM is suitable for identifying sentiment data about the Covid-19 vaccine in Indonesia. Additional study can be conducted with richer tweet data, more thorough preprocessing, and comparison to other classification algorithms to obtain a higher categorization evaluation score.

Analyzing Impact of Social Media Sentiments on Financial Markets

This paper analyzes the impact of continuously changing sentiments on apparently unstable stock exchange. Right when a monetary supporter decides to buy or sell stock, his decision is very much dependent on to rise or fall in price of the stock. In this paper, we look at the possibility of using notion attitudes (good versus negative) and moreover sentiments (delight, feel sorry for, etc) isolated from finance related news or tweets to help predict stock worth turns of events. This examination uses a model-self-ruling approach to manage uncover the mysterious components of stock exchange data using distinctive significant learning techniques like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU).

Social Media Behavior and Emotional Evolution during Emergency Events.

Online social networks have recently become a vital source for emergency event news and the consequent venting of emotions. However, knowledge on what drives user emotion and behavioral responses to emergency event developments are still limited. Therefore, unlike previous studies that have only explored trending themes and public sentiment in social media, this study sought to develop a holistic framework to assess the impact of emergency developments on emotions and behavior by exploring the evolution of trending themes and public sentiments in social media posts as a focal event developed. By examining the event timelines and the associated hashtags on the popular Chinese social media site Sina-Weibo, the 2019 Wuxi viaduct collapse accident was taken as the research object and the event timeline and the Sina-Weibo tagging function focused on to analyze the behaviors and emotional changes in the social media users and elucidate the correlations. It can conclude that: (i) There were some social media rules being adhered to and that new focused news from the same event impacted user behavior and the popularity of previous thematic discussions. (ii) While the most critical function for users appeared to express their emotions, the user foci changed when recent focus news emerged. (iii) As the news of the collapse deepened, the change in user sentiment was found to be positively correlated with the information released by personal-authentication accounts. This research provides a new perspective on the extraction of information from social media platforms in emergencies and social-emotional transmission rules.

A Proposal for Studying Social Media Sentiments about Corrections in the United States

A qualitative study of 85,000 engagements on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit about corrections reform using the Pulsar social media listening software. Assessing the alignment of social media expressions in forums, and the evidence in the literature materials about re-design thinking of successful reforms to U.S. corrections, reveal a resurgence of discontent that “nothing works” (1970s thinking). There is a disturbing disconnection between the sciences about what does work in rehabilitation—i.e., assessments, treatment, education, and employment—and the understandings in social media discourse. Accordingly, corrections professionals, policymakers, and students need to express informed opinions on social media platforms so that future corrections approaches trade “nothing works” for what has proved to work.

Data analysis of resident engagement and sentiments in social media enables better household waste segregation and recycling

Waste segregation, recycling and reduction have been prioritised in the Circular Economy transition of household waste management to reduce environmental impacts. With digitalisation and innovation developments in waste management, residents become more active on waste management-related social media platforms. However, there is still needed a tangible analysis of resident engagement (e.g. user comments and interactions) and related sentiment changes on such platforms to enhance waste management and ease the environmental burden at source. This study develops an integrated solution to analyse resident engagement by leveraging statistical analysis and text-mining methods. Four interrelated components are incorporated in the solution: population behaviour quantification, sentiment analysis and dynamics, popular concerns and probability distribution fitting, and rule-based managerial insight identification. The novel solution is applied to a real-world case study on a subscription account related to waste management in Shanghai. This research produces several major observations based on the studied case: (i) The resident engagement Monday-to-Thursday was more active than Friday-to-Sunday. (ii) Compared to 2018, the resident engagement by commenting on online posts was elevated by 107.1% in 2019 when Shanghai introduced a new management policy. Meanwhile, the yearly resource-type waste collection was increased by 114.5% in 2019. (iii) It took approximately one year to recover positive sentiments in user comments after introducing the policy. However, the comments with negative sentiments assisted in improving waste management. (iv) The best-fitted negative binomial distribution of the number of votes for user comments could guarantee the managerial insight identification from the minority of comments with popular concerns.

COVID-19 sentiment analysis via deep learning during the rise of novel cases.

Social scientists and psychologists take interest in understanding how people express emotions and sentiments when dealing with catastrophic events such as natural disasters, political unrest, and terrorism. The COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophic event that has raised a number of psychological issues such as depression given abrupt social changes and lack of employment. Advancements of deep learning-based language models have been promising for sentiment analysis with data from social networks such as Twitter. Given the situation with COVID-19 pandemic, different countries had different peaks where rise and fall of new cases affected lock-downs which directly affected the economy and employment. During the rise of COVID-19 cases with stricter lock-downs, people have been expressing their sentiments in social media. This can provide a deep understanding of human psychology during catastrophic events. In this paper, we present a framework that employs deep learning-based language models via long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks for sentiment analysis during the rise of novel COVID-19 cases in India. The framework features LSTM language model with a global vector embedding and state-of-art BERT language model. We review the sentiments expressed for selective months in 2020 which covers the major peak of novel cases in India. Our framework utilises multi-label sentiment classification where more than one sentiment can be expressed at once. Our results indicate that the majority of the tweets have been positive with high levels of optimism during the rise of the novel COVID-19 cases and the number of tweets significantly lowered towards the peak. We find that the optimistic, annoyed and joking tweets mostly dominate the monthly tweets with much lower portion of negative sentiments. The predictions generally indicate that although the majority have been optimistic, a significant group of population has been annoyed towards the way the pandemic was handled by the authorities.

Public Initial Response to Indonesian Government’s Handling and Communicating of COVID-19 Pandemic

Uncertain situation during pandemic in its initial stage generated negative, positive, and neutral sentiments in online and social media. This research aimed to describe public initial response to Indonesian Government’s health crisis communication in handling COVID-19 Pandemic. This research utilized a big data analysis of data collected from March 2, 2020 to April 7, 2020. A total of 23,229 conversations were recorded consisting of 8,855 on the website, 1,584 on Facebook, 2,904 on Youtube, and 9,886 on Twitter. This analysis shows that in the first two weeks, the discussion about the Corona virus issue was not too massive albeit its negative tones. The third and fourth weeks of talk about Corona were much more pervasive with varied tones: positive, negative, and neutral. The coverage on the news website is much more positive than the responses on Facebook and YouTube, in which the latter held the most negative tones. The increasing number of responses on the website was triggered by the government’s announcement of a National Emergency situation on 30 March 2020. This illustrates that the public needed certainty of information from the government. When information and news were positive or full of optimism, positive responses sentiment would also occur on social media and on website news. This study concluded that public response toward the pandemic issue was previously done mostly on social media towards website platform with many trusted news portals. The topics and words changed from health topics to government policies against the Corona outbreak.

Comparing Overall and Targeted Sentiments in Social Media during Crises

The tracking of citizens' reactions in social media during crises has attracted an increasing level of interest in the research community. In particular, sentiment analysis over social media posts can be regarded as a particularly useful tool, enabling civil protection and law enforcement agencies to more effectively respond during this type of situation. Prior work on sentiment analysis in social media during crises has applied well-known techniques for overall sentiment detection in posts. However, we argue that sentiment analysis of the overall post might not always be suitable, as it may miss the presence of more targeted sentiments, e.g. about the people and organizations involved (which we refer to as sentiment targets). Through a crowdsourcing study, we show that there are marked differences between the overall tweet sentiment and the sentiment expressed towards the subjects mentioned in tweets related to three crises events.

Managing Bad News in Social Media: A Case Study on Domino’s Pizza Crisis

Social media has become prominently popular. Tens of millions of users login to social media sites like Twitter to disseminate breaking news and share their opinions and thoughts. For businesses, social media is potentially useful for monitoring the public perception and the social reputation of companies and products. Despite great potential, how bad news about a company influences the public sentiments in social media has not been studied in depth. The aim of this study is to assess people’s sentiments in Twitter upon the spread of two types of information: corporate bad news and a CEO’s apology. We attempted to understand how sentiments on corporate bad news propagate in Twitter and whether any social network feature facilitates its spread. We investigated the Domino’s Pizza crisis in 2009, where bad news spread rapidly through social media followed by an official apology from the company. Our work shows that bad news spreads faster than other types of information, such as an apology, and sparks a great degree of negative sentiments in the network. However, when users converse about bad news repeatedly, their negative sentiments are softened. We discuss various reactions of users towards the bad news in social media such as negative purchase intent.

Sport event and destination co-branding: Analysis of social media sentiment in an international, professional sport event crisis

This study investigates the sentiment of social media user-generated content (UGC) when an international, professional sport event is cancelled due to a crisis. The purpose is to provide insight into the brand implications for both the sport event and the host destination. From a co-branding perspective this paper analyses the cancellation of the 2018 Margaret River Pro surfing event. Leximancer analysis of 5684 Twitter posts across three time periods (pre, during, post crisis) over a calendar year found that sentiment shifted, and negative sentiment was more closely aligned to the destination than the event. This exploratory study seeks to unpack some of the complexities of event and destination co-branding and crisis management, presenting implications for industry and academia. In doing so, the study contributes to the paucity of scholarly knowledge examining real-time social media users' response to a crisis in a sport event tourism context.

SentiXGboost: enhanced sentiment analysis in social media posts with ensemble XGBoost classifier

ABSTRACT Sentiment Analysis has emerged as one of the most challenging and significant research directions in text mining. The first milestone of Sentiment Analysis involves identifying the polarity of sentiments in social media and classifying them as positive or negative. Most of the previous work on sentiment analysis has focused on designing a classifier, for a specific dataset, using supervised machine learning approaches and feature extraction methods. Notably, choosing the most appropriate classification technique to correctly classify the sentiment polarity of text is crucial. Thus, this study proposes a novel ensemble classifier approach, which utilizes a combination of multiple feature sets with ensemble classification by combining multiple base classifiers, which are weak learners, into an ensemble classifier. These feature sets include Bag of Words, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency, Part of Speech, N-gram, Opinion Lexicon, and Term Frequency. The experiments confirm that the proposed ensemble method outperforms all individual classifiers and significantly improves the overall sentiment classification performance on the most frequently used datasets in Sentiment Analysis.

Social media sentiment, model uncertainty, and volatility forecasting

Many economic indicators including consumer confidence indices used to forecast volatility or macroeconomic outcomes, are published with a considerable time lag. To obtain a timelier measure of consumer sentiment many central bank and economic researchers are turning towards using state-of-the-art text sentiment analysis tools. We examine if there are benefits for forecasting volatility from (i) incorporating a sentiment measure derived using deep learning from Twitter messages at the 1-min level, and (ii) acknowledging specification uncertainty of the lag index in the heterogeneous autoregression (HAR) model. We present evidence from an out of sample forecasting exercise that suggests including social media sentiment can significantly improve the forecasting accuracy of a popular volatility index, particularly in short time horizons. Further, our results document large gains in predictive accuracy from a newly proposed estimator that allows for model uncertainty in the specification of the lag index when using a HAR estimator.

Applying sentiment analytics to examine social media crises: a case study of United Airline's crisis in 2017

PurposeIn recent years, social media crises occurred more and more often, which negatively affect the reputations of individuals, businesses and communities. During each crisis, numerous users either participated in online discussion or widely spread crisis-related information to their friends and followers on social media. By applying sentiment analysis to study a social media crisis of airline carriers, the purpose of this research is to help companies take measure against social media crises.Design/methodology/approachThis study used sentiment analytics to examine a social media crisis related to airline carriers. The arousal, valence, negative, positive and eight emotional sentiments were applied to analyze social media data collected from Twitter.FindingsThis research study found that social media sentiment analysis is useful to monitor public reaction after a social media crisis arises. The sentiment results are able to reflect the development of social media crises quite well. Proper and timely response strategies to a crisis can mitigate the crisis through effective communication with the customers and the public.Originality/valueThis study used the Affective Norms of English Words (ANEW) dictionary to classify the words in social media data and assigned the words with two elements to measure the emotions: valence and arousal. The intensity of the sentiment determines the public reaction to a social media crisis. An opinion-oriented information system is proposed as a solution for resolving a social media crisis in the paper.

Information Theoretic Causality Detection between Financial and Sentiment Data.

The interaction between the flow of sentiment expressed on blogs and media and the dynamics of the stock market prices are analyzed through an information-theoretic measure, the transfer entropy, to quantify causality relations. We analyzed daily stock price and daily social media sentiment for the top 50 companies in the Standard & Poor (S&P) index during the period from November 2018 to November 2020. We also analyzed news mentioning these companies during the same period. We found that there is a causal flux of information that links those companies. The largest fraction of significant causal links is between prices and between sentiments, but there is also significant causal information which goes both ways from sentiment to prices and from prices to sentiment. We observe that the strongest causal signal between sentiment and prices is associated with the Tech sector.

The potential impact of media commentary and social influence on consumer preferences for driverless cars

The emerging technology of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is envisaged to substantially alter transport systems and travel behaviour. However, this impact is conditional on the level and rate of AV market penetration. This study examines consumers’ consideration to adopt AVs, with a particular focus on the impact of informational cues from different communication channels. Data for our analysis is collected through an online survey conducted in December 2019, and our sample comprises 862 residents from Sydney, Australia. The survey asks respondents about their social networks, and their use of different mass and social media platforms. Respondents are subsequently presented a discrete choice experiment where we systematically vary informational cues about AVs from each of these communication channels, and respondents are asked to indicate their willingness to consider AVs under each scenario. This data is used to develop a latent class choice model of AV consideration as a function of the informational cues received from different communication channels. Our model also considers the level of trust that respondents associate with their social contacts when modelling the effect of word-of-mouth from these social contacts. The results reveal eleven segments in the sample that differ from one another in terms of sociodemographic attributes, evaluation of social contact trust, and the relative importance they attach to different communication channels. The findings show social media sentiment has the highest effect on AV consideration for 90 per cent of the sample. Also 3.8 per cent of the sample never consider adopting AVs, regardless of the informational cues.