SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF COVID-19 TWEETS

Abstract

Sentiment analysis involves techniques used in analyzing texts in order to identify the sentiment and emotion dominant in such texts and classify them accordingly. Techniques involved include but not limited to preprocessing of texts and the use a machine learning or lexical based approach in classifying these texts. In this research, attempt was made to adopt a machine learning approach to classify tweets on Covid-19 which is considered a global pandemic. To achieve this noble objective, a cross-dataset approach was applied to train four machine learning classification algorithms: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF) and Naïve Bayes (NB), as well as K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm (KNN). The final result will not only assist us in knowing the best performing algorithm, it will also assist in creating awareness on Covid-19 with the final objective of destigmatizing the patients through the analysis of sentiments and emotions on Covid-19  and finally use the same result for containing the spread of the pandemic