Sentiment Analysis of News Reports in the Period of New Coronavirus

Abstract

The spread of new coronavirus has a significant impact on the world. To protect people from viruses, a large number of personnel and substances in research, production, medical treatment, and other aspects are used to deal with the virus. News reporting is an important way for people to obtain information about the coronavirus. Objective and immediate news reports can provide people with accurate information and correct response methods, thus playing their due role in defeating the coronavirus. In order to compare the emotional characteristics of news reports, the methods of natural language processing are used to conduct sentiment analysis on news reports, including the subjectivity and the polarity of news reports. We select the news websites of BBC and CNN, that have an important influence in the world, for comparative analysis. The results show that BBC news reports are more positive than CNN, and in terms of subjective, BBC News is more factual than CNN.