Aspect-based Sentiment and Correlation-based Emotion Detection on Tweets for Understanding Public Opinion of Covid-19

Abstract

Background: During the Covid-19 period, the government made policies dealing with it. Policies issued by the government invited public opinion as a form of public reaction to these policies. The easiest way to find out the public’s response is through Twitter’s social media. However, Twitter data have limitations. There is a mix between facts and personal opinions. It is necessary to distinguish between these. Opinions expressed by the public can be both positive and negative, so correlation is needed to link opinions and their emotions. Objective: This study discusses sentiment and emotion detection to understand public opinion accurately. Sentiment and emotion are analyzed using Pearson correlation to determine the correlation. Methods: The datasets were about public opinion of Covid-19 retrieved from Twitter. The data were annotated into sentiment and emotion using Pearson correlation. After the annotation process, the data were preprocessed. Afterward, single model classification was carried out using machine learning methods (Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Naïve Bayes) and deep learning method (Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers). The classification process was focused on accuracy and F1-score evaluation. Results: There were three scenarios for determining sentiment and emotion, namely the factor of aspect-based and correlation-based, without those factors, and aspect-based sentiment only. The scenario using the two aforementioned factors obtained an accuracy value of 97%, while an accuracy of 96% was acquired without them. Conclusion: The use of aspect and correlation with Pearson correlation has helped better understand public opinion regarding sentiment and emotion more accurately.   Keywords: Aspect-based sentiment, Deep learning, Emotion detection, Machine learning, Pearson correlation, Public opinion.