Analysing Shifts in Perceptions of Indians during COVID-19 Pandemic by Mining Tweets

Abstract

Current pandemic situation has a significant impact affecting human life not only socially and economically, but emotionally and psychologically as well. This impact can be easily observed on social media platforms. Along with the knowledge exchange related to Covid-19 pandemic on social media, there is an emotional trauma wave that can be felt by carefully analyzing the activities of this social media. Keeping this view in thought, we analyze around 12000 tweets of Indian people to find out whether there is a trend shift of thinking pattern and mindset of Indian people as the pandemic progresses. The study is bifurcated into stages to clearly see the paradigm shift. We use tweets since twitter is a rich medium that can be leveraged to its optimum to have a good amount of understanding of the sentiments of the people. Analyzing the twitter dataset, we derive results and find out whether the amount of negative tweets v/s positive (or motivational) tweets have increased or not as the pandemic progresses. The study is supported by graphical visualizations of the polarity of the tweets month wise. Further, Wordmap approach is used to perform qualitative mining analysis in addition to the sentiment score based calculation. This work helps us to understand how the public opinions are changing with the changes in the spread dynamics of the virus. This kind of mood mining helps in identifying the Covid-19 situation from the psychological perspective that whether there is a sense of fear among people or they are quite optimistic of the situation. It can help in a great extend to the strategic and decision making bodies to plan out for future decisions. Further, such kind of studies can be used as reference to provide insights about mental health of people for any future incident or event of such nature.