Demonetization and its aftermath: an analysis based on twitter sentiments

Abstract

Sentiment analysis has become a very useful tool in recent times for studying people’s opinions, sentiments and subjective evaluation of any event of social and economic relevance, and in particular, policy decisions. The present paper proposes a framework for sentiment analysis using twitter data for the ’demonetization’ effort of the Government of India. The paper employs twitter data using Twitter API. The methodology of the paper involves collection of data from twitter from different cities of India using geolocation and preprocessing followed by a lexicon-based approach to analyse users’ sentiments over a period of five weeks preceding the policy announcement. In addition to this, the paper also attempts to analyse the sentiments of specific groups of people representing diverse interest groups.