ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 outbreak is a disastrous event that has elevated many psychological problems such as lack of employment and depression given abrupt social changes. Simultaneously, psychologists and social scientists have drawn considerable attention towards understanding how people express their sentiments and emotions during the pandemic. With the rise in COVID-19 cases with strict lockdowns, people expressed their opinions publicly on social networking platforms. This provides a deeper knowledge of human psychology at the time of disastrous events. By applying user-produced content on social networking platforms such as Twitter, the sentiments and views of people are analyzed to assist in introducing awareness campaigns and health intervention policies. The modern evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) mechanisms has revealed remarkable performance in sentimental analysis (SA). This study develops a new Marine Predator Optimization with Natural Language Processing for Twitter Sentiment Analysis (MPONLP-TSA) for the COVID-19 Pandemic. The presented MPONLP-TSA model is focused on the recognition of sentiments that exist in the Twitter data during the COVID-19 pandemic. The presented MPONLP-TSA technique undergoes data preprocessing to convert the data into a useful format. Furthermore, the BERT model is used to derive word vectors. To detect and classify sentiments, a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BiRNN) model is utilized. Finally, the MPO algorithm is exploited for optimal hyperparameter tuning process, and it assists in enhancing the overall classification performance. The experimental validation of the MPONLP-TSA approach can be tested by utilizing the COVID-19 tweets dataset from the Kaggle repository. A wide comparable study reported a better outcome of the MPONLP-TSA method over current approaches.