A social media mining using topic modeling and sentiment analysis on tourism in Malaysia during COVID19

Abstract

Malaysia’s tourism is affected by the Covid19 pandemic and the MCO implementation, where borders are closed and non-essential activities are halted. Negative effects are also felt by Malaysians and are reflected in social media. This study examines two research questions, finding the issues that Twitter users have been addressing on tourism activities during the MCO period and analyze users’ sentiment regarding their ability to travel after MCO. 5000 data were extracted manually from 11357 data scraped from Twitter, of which 3243 were pre-processed keywords using RapidMiner. The results show that the topic of the debate focuses on three themes, namely the destination of tourism, future planning, and public emotions. In addition, 63% gave a positive view and 22% negative sentiment on domestic tourism. Overall, users of Twitter gave an optimistic outlook on domestic travel and hoped that Covid19 would soon be over.