Detecting and Understanding Sentiment Trends and Emotion Patterns of Twitter Users—A Study on the Demise of a Bollywood Celebrity

Abstract

Detecting societal sentiment trends and emotion patterns is of great interest. Due to the time-varying nature of these patterns and trends this detection can be a challenging task. In this paper, the emotion patterns and trends are detected among social media users in a certain case and it is noted that the detection of the trends and patterns is especially difficult in this medium because of the use of informal language. In particular, the role of social networks in the expression of emotions relating to the death of a well-known and loved Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput (SSR) by their fans is explored. The data for the analysis of the emotional state and the sentiment levels of the fans has been acquired from Twitter posts. Different existing sentiment analysis algorithms were compared for the study and chosen for identifying the sentiment trend over a specific timeline of events. The same Twitter posts were also analyzed for emotional content by extracting linguistic features using the psycholinguistic package, Linguistic Inquiry and the Word Count package (LIWC), relating to emotions. Additionally, viral hashtags extracted from the Twitter posts have been segmented and analyzed in order to identify new viral hashtags expressed by the posts over time. The associations between the old and new viral hashtags and between sentiment trends and emotional shifts among the fan base of SSR have been determined and presented graphically.