Tweet Sentiment Analysis for Predicting the Symptoms Effect Level Regarding COVID-19

From the end of 2019, numerous comments and opinions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic have been posted on Twitter. The number of opinions rapidly increased since the countries began implementing social isolation and reduction. In these comments, users often express different emotions regarding COVID-19 signs and symptoms, the majority of which are sadness and fear sentiments. It is important to determine the symptom effect level for the emotions of symptomatic persons based on their opinions. However, no study analyzes the tweets' sentiment related to the COVID-19 topic to predict the symptoms effect level. Therefore, in this study, we present a method to predict the symptoms effect level based on the sentiment analysis of symptomatic persons according to the following steps. First, the sentiments in tweets are analyzed by using a combination of the text representation model and convolutional neural network. Second, a topic modeling model is built based on the latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm to group symptoms into small clusters that conform to sadness and fear sentiments. Finally, the symptom effect level is predicted based on the probability distribution of the symptoms in each sentiment cluster. Experiments using tweets promise that the proposed method achieves significant results toward the accuracy and obtained information.