Twitter Sentiment Analysis During Covid-19 Outbreak with VADER

Abstract

The Covid-19 outbreak, which has been under the influence of Europe since then, continues to spread rapidly especially in the American continent. Looking at the current data, the virus has affected about 250 million people and has killed more than five million people. Especially with the rapid spread of the outbreak in the European continent, this issue started to be discussed in social media. In particular, Twitter is the most frequently used micro-blogging in this workspace. In this study, it is aimed to analyze the tweets shared by many people, organizations and government agencies through Twitter during the global COVID-19 outbreak with sentiment analysis using the VADER Sentiment Analysis method. The hashtags #covid19, #Covid, #pandemic, #social-distancing, #socialdistance, #covid-19, #corona-virius, #coronavirus, #Chinesevirus, #Chinese-virus were used in this study. With these hashtags, a total of 60,243,040 tweets were collected from Twitter between January 1, 2020 and July 1, 2020. In this study, we use the VADER to classify the sentiments expressed in Twitter data related to Covid-19 and the compound scores of the resulting tweets were divided into five categories: Highly Positive, Positive, Neutral, Negative, Highly Negative. In addition, in the study, the Wordcloud was used to visualize the most frequently collected text data monthly, and N-grams were applied to the tweets to better understand the content of the tweets. When the results obtained in the study are examined, the tweets shared about Covid-19 in different periods of the release reflect different sentimental situations.