ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic made a significant impact on society, including the widespread implementation of lockdowns to prevent the spread of the virus. This measure led to a decrease in face-to-face social interactions and, as an equivalent, an increase in the use of social media platforms, such as Twitter. As part of Industry 4.0, sentiment analysis can be exploited to study public attitudes toward future pandemics and sociopolitical situations in general. This work presents an analysis framework by applying a combination of natural language processing techniques and machine learning algorithms to classify the sentiment of each tweet as positive, or negative. Through extensive experimentation, we expose the ideal model for this task and, subsequently, utilize sentiment predictions to perform time series analysis over the course of the pandemic. In addition, a change point detection algorithm was applied in order to identify the turning points in public attitudes toward the pandemic, which were validated by cross-referencing the news report at that particular period of time. Finally, we study the relationship between sentiment trends on social media and, news coverage of the pandemic, providing insights into the public's perception of the pandemic and its influence on the news.