Predicting aspect-based sentiment using deep learning and information visualization: The impact of COVID-19 on the airline industry

This study investigates customer satisfaction through aspect-level sentiment analysis and visual analytics. We collected and examined the flight reviews on TripAdvisor from January 2016 to August 2020 to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on passenger travel sentiment in several aspects. Till now, information systems, management, and tourism research have paid little attention to the use of deep learning and word embedding techniques, such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, especially for aspect-level sentiment analysis. This paper aims to identify perceived aspect-based sentiments and predict unrated sentiments for various categories to address this research gap. Ultimately, this study complements existing sentiment analysis methods and extends the use of data-driven and visual analytics approaches to better understand customer satisfaction in the airline industry and within the context of the COVID-19. Our proposed method outperforms baseline comparisons and therefore contributes to the theoretical and managerial literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

A stance dataset with aspect-based sentiment information from Indonesian COVID-19 vaccination-related tweets.

As a platform of social media with high activity, Twitter has seen the discussion of many hot topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic. One such is the COVID-19 vaccination program, which has skeptics in several religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups, and Indonesia has one of the largest populations of various ethnicities and religions of countries worldwide. Diverse opinions based on skepticism about the effectiveness of vaccines can increase the number of people who refuse or delay vaccine acceptance. Therefore, it is important to analyze and monitor stances and public opinions on social media, especially on vaccine topics, as part of the long-term solution to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study presents the Indonesian COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets data set that contains stance and aspect-based sentiment information. The data were collected monthly from January to October 2021 using specific keywords. There are nine thousand tweets manually annotated by three independent analysts. We annotated each tweet with three labels of stance and seven predetermined aspects related to Indonesian COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets: services, implementation, apps, costs, participants, vaccine products, and general. The dataset is useful for many research purposes, including stance detection, aspect-based sentiment analysis, topic detection, and public opinion analysis on Twitter, especially on the policies regarding the prevention of pandemics.

Aspect based sentiment analysis using multi-criteria decision-making and deep learning under COVID-19 pandemic in India.

The COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on the global economy and health. While the pandemic continues to cause casualties in millions, many countries have gone under lockdown. During this period, people have to stay within walls and become more addicted towards social networks. They express their emotions and sympathy via these online platforms. Thus, popular social media (Twitter and Facebook) have become rich sources of information for Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis on COVID-19-related issues. We have used Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis to anticipate the polarity of public opinion underlying different aspects from Twitter during lockdown and stepwise unlock phases. The goal of this study is to find the feelings of Indians about the lockdown initiative taken by the Government of India to stop the spread of Coronavirus. India-specific COVID-19 tweets have been annotated, for analysing the sentiment of common public. To classify the Twitter data set a deep learning model has been proposed which has achieved accuracies of 82.35% for Lockdown and 83.33% for Unlock data set. The suggested method outperforms many of the contemporary approaches (long short-term memory, Bi-directional long short-term memory, Gated Recurrent Unit etc.). This study highlights the public sentiment on lockdown and stepwise unlocks, imposed by the Indian Government on various aspects during the Corona outburst.

Triggers and Tweets: Implicit Aspect-Based Sentiment and Emotion Analysis of Community Chatter Relevant to Education Post-COVID-19

This research proposes a well-being analytical framework using social media chatter data. The proposed framework infers analytics and provides insights into the public’s well-being relevant to education throughout and post the COVID-19 pandemic through a comprehensive Emotion and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Moreover, this research aims to examine the variability in emotions of students, parents, and faculty toward the e-learning process over time and across different locations. The proposed framework curates Twitter chatter data relevant to the education sector, identifies tweets with the sentiment, and then identifies the exact emotion and emotional triggers associated with those feelings through implicit ABSA. The produced analytics are then factored by location and time to provide more comprehensive insights that aim to assist the decision-makers and personnel in the educational sector enhance and adapt the educational process during and following the pandemic and looking toward the future. The experimental results for emotion classification show that the Linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC) outperformed other classifiers in terms of overall accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure of 91%. Moreover, the Logistic Regression classifier outperformed all other classifiers in terms of overall accuracy, recall, an F-measure of 81%, and precision of 83% for aspect classification. In online experiments using UAE COVID-19 education-related data, the analytics show high relevance with the public concerns around the education process that were reported during the experiment’s timeframe. © 2022 by the authors.

Stance Detection on Tweets with Multi-task Aspect-based Sentiment: A Case Study of COVID-19 Vaccination

Public opinion analyses on Twitter conducted based on sentiment analysis cannot identify the author’s stance regarding agreement or disagreement with a given target. Stance detection determines whether the author of a text is in favor, against, or neutral towards a target. However, stance detection based on text-only is less representative opinion, especially on a tweet, which is a short text with slightly contextual information. Therefore, more information is needed to represent the author's stance better. In previous research, most research on stance detection was carried out using simple sentiment information to measure the support to target. This study addresses multi-task aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) and social features for stance detection based on deep learning models of BiGRU-BERT on tweets. Our contribution combines aspect-based sentiment information with features based on textual and contextual information that does not emerge directly from Twitter texts. ABSA approach can provide more accurate sentiment information at aspect level on tweets, which is possible contains multiple issues discussed. Aspect information on tweets can reflect the issue that influences the author’s stance toward a target. Multi-task learning was applied to help improve the generalization performance of ABSA with simultaneous processes. We extracted social attributes and online behavioral features for contextual information. Since same community tends to have the same opinion towards a target, we applied a community detection task and combine with the Twitter social attributes. The proposed method has significantly improved evaluation metrics (>10%) than textual features only for stance detection on tweets © 2022. International Journal of Intelligent Engineering and Systems.All Rights Reserved

Tracking Public Attitudes Toward COVID-19 Vaccination on Tweets in Canada: Using Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis.

BACKGROUND: The development and approval of COVID-19 vaccines have generated optimism for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and a return to normalcy. However, vaccine hesitancy, often fueled by misinformation, poses a major barrier to achieving herd immunity. OBJECTIVE: We aim to investigate Twitter users' attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination in Canada after vaccine rollout. METHODS: We applied a weakly supervised aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) technique, which involves the human-in-the-loop system, on COVID-19 vaccination-related tweets in Canada. Automatically generated aspect and opinion terms were manually corrected by public health experts to ensure the accuracy of the terms and make them more domain-specific. Then, based on these manually corrected terms, the system inferred sentiments toward the aspects. We observed sentiments toward key aspects related to COVID-19 vaccination, and investigated how sentiments toward "vaccination" changed over time. In addition, we analyzed the most retweeted or liked tweets by observing most frequent nouns and sentiments toward key aspects. RESULTS: After applying the ABSA system, we obtained 170 aspect terms (eg, "immunity" and "pfizer") and 6775 opinion terms (eg, "trustworthy" for the positive sentiment and "jeopardize" for the negative sentiment). While manually verifying or editing these terms, our public health experts selected 20 key aspects related to COVID-19 vaccination for analysis. The sentiment analysis results for the 20 key aspects revealed negative sentiments related to "vaccine distribution," "side effects," "allergy," "reactions," and "anti-vaxxer," and positive sentiments related to "vaccine campaign," "vaccine candidates," and "immune response." These results indicate that the Twitter users express concerns about the safety of vaccines but still consider vaccines as the option to end the pandemic. In addition, compared to the sentiment of the remaining tweets, the most retweeted or liked tweets showed more positive sentiment overall toward key aspects (P<.001), especially vaccines (P<.001) and vaccination (P=.009). Further investigation of the most retweeted or liked tweets revealed two opposing trends in Twitter users who showed negative sentiments toward vaccines: the "anti-vaxxer" population that used negative sentiments as a means to discourage vaccination and the "Covid Zero" population that used negative sentiments to encourage vaccinations while critiquing the public health response. CONCLUSIONS: Our study examined public sentiments toward COVID-19 vaccination on tweets over an extended period in Canada. Our findings could inform public health agencies to design and implement interventions to promote vaccination.

Exploring how online responses change in response to debunking messages about COVID-19 on WhatsApp

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a concurrent outbreak of false information online. Debunking false information about a health crisis is critical as misinformation can trigger protests or panic, which necessitates a better understanding of it. This exploratory study examined the effects of debunking messages on a COVID-19-related public chat on WhatsApp in Singapore. Design/methodology/approach: To understand the effects of debunking messages about COVID-19 on WhatsApp conversations, the following was studied. The relationship between source credibility (i.e. characteristics of a communicator that affect the receiver's acceptance of the message) of different debunking message types and their effects on the length of the conversation, sentiments towards various aspects of a crisis, and the information distortions in a message thread were studied. Deep learning techniques, knowledge graphs (KG), and content analyses were used to perform aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) of the messages and measure information distortion. Findings: Debunking messages with higher source credibility (e.g. providing evidence from authoritative sources like health authorities) help close a discussion thread earlier. Shifts in sentiments towards some aspects of the crisis highlight the value of ABSA in monitoring the effectiveness of debunking messages. Finally, debunking messages with lower source credibility (e.g. stating that the information is false without any substantiation) are likely to increase information distortion in conversation threads. Originality/value: The study supports the importance of source credibility in debunking and an ABSA approach in analysing the effect of debunking messages during a health crisis, which have practical value for public agencies during a health crisis. Studying differences in the source credibility of debunking messages on WhatsApp is a novel shift from the existing approaches. Additionally, a novel approach to measuring information distortion using KGs was used to shed insights on how debunking can reduce information distortions. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

UAE e-learning sentiment analysis framework

This research project predicts and infers real-time insights on public mental health relevant to education during and after the COVID-19 pandemic by modeling, deploying, and testing an end-to-end spatiotemporal sentiment analysis framework. Moreover, the project aims to analyze the sentiments and emotions of the public;from Twitter, toward the current context of the e-learning process factored by aspects and emotions. The framework consists of four predictive models based on statistical analysis and machine learning to analyze the UAE education-related Twitter dataset. The first analytics is spatiotemporal analytics, which describes an event at a specific time and specific location. Spatiotemporal analytics is used as the base for the remaining three analytics: Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis, sentiment analysis, and emotion analysis. Aspectbased Sentiment Analysis considers the words/terms related to relevant aspects and then identify the sentiment associated with them. Sentiment Analysis is used to extract the sentiment in a specific text. Emotion Analysis identifies the type of emotion felt by users in their tweets. All the analytics will be visualized into a responsive website that provides a prompt understanding of the public opinions and their feedback towards the e-learning process. As a result, a group of recommendations is generated based on the analytics' resulting emotion to enhance the mental health. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

Extracting sentiments towards COVID-19 aspects

In this paper, we introduce a specialized Russian dataset and study approaches for aspect-based sentiment analysis of Russian users’ comments about the COVID-19. We solve two tasks, namely Relevance Determination (RD), which aims to predict whether a sentence is relevant to an aspect of the pandemic, and Sentiment Classification (SC), which classifies the sentiment expressed towards an aspect in a sentence. We applied and tested various methods of machine learning, including finetuning of the pre-trained RuBERT model. The best results in both tasks were obtained by RuBERT model in the Natural Language Inference (NLI) formulation. Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors.

Predicting aspect-based sentiment using deep learning and information visualization: The impact of COVID-19 on the airline industry

This study investigates customer satisfaction through aspect-level sentiment analysis and visual analytics. We collected and examined the flight reviews on TripAdvisor from January 2016 to August 2020 to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on passenger travel sentiment in several aspects. Till now, information systems, management, and tourism research have paid little attention to the use of deep learning and word embedding techniques, such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, especially for aspect-level sentiment analysis. This paper aims to identify perceived aspect-based sentiments and predict unrated sentiments for various categories to address this research gap. Ultimately, this study complements existing sentiment analysis methods and extends the use of data-driven and visual analytics approaches to better understand customer satisfaction in the airline industry and within the context of the COVID-19. Our proposed method outperforms baseline comparisons and therefore contributes to the theoretical and managerial literature.

Tracking COVID-19 Discourse on Twitter in North America: Infodemiology Study Using Topic Modeling and Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Social media is a rich source where we can learn about people's reactions to social issues. As COVID-19 has impacted people's lives, it is essential to capture how people react to public health interventions and understand their concerns. OBJECTIVE: We aim to investigate people's reactions and concerns about COVID-19 in North America, especially in Canada. METHODS: We analyzed COVID-19-related tweets using topic modeling and aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), and interpreted the results with public health experts. To generate insights on the effectiveness of specific public health interventions for COVID-19, we compared timelines of topics discussed with the timing of implementation of interventions, synergistically including information on people's sentiment about COVID-19-related aspects in our analysis. In addition, to further investigate anti-Asian racism, we compared timelines of sentiments for Asians and Canadians. RESULTS: Topic modeling identified 20 topics, and public health experts provided interpretations of the topics based on top-ranked words and representative tweets for each topic. The interpretation and timeline analysis showed that the discovered topics and their trend are highly related to public health promotions and interventions such as physical distancing, border restrictions, handwashing, staying home, and face coverings. After training the data using ABSA with human-in-the-loop, we obtained 545 aspect terms (eg, "vaccines," "economy," and "masks") and 60 opinion terms such as "infectious" (negative) and "professional" (positive), which were used for inference of sentiments of 20 key aspects selected by public health experts. The results showed negative sentiments related to the overall outbreak, misinformation and Asians, and positive sentiments related to physical distancing. CONCLUSIONS: Analyses using natural language processing techniques with domain expert involvement can produce useful information for public health. This study is the first to analyze COVID-19-related tweets in Canada in comparison with tweets in the United States by using topic modeling and human-in-the-loop domain-specific ABSA. This kind of information could help public health agencies to understand public concerns as well as what public health messages are resonating in our populations who use Twitter, which can be helpful for public health agencies when designing a policy for new interventions.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Using Attribute Extraction of Hospital Reviews.

The Covid pandemic has become a serious public health challenge for people across India and other nations. Nowadays, people rely on the online reviews being shared on different review sites to gather information about hospitals like the availability of beds, availability of ventilators, etc. However, since these reviews are large in number and are unstructured, patients struggle to get accurate and reliable information about the hospitals, due to which they end up taking admission into a hospital which might not be appropriate for the specific treatment they require. This paper employs the use of sentiment analysis to understand various online reviews of hospitals and provide valuable information to the patients. Approximately 30,000 + reviews were collected from more than 500 hospitals. The broad objective of the study is to give the patients a comprehensive and descriptive rating of the hospitals based on the online reviews given by different patients. In addition to providing a comprehensive summary, the study has conducted aspect-based analysis where it compares the hospitals based on four different aspects of the hospital viz. "Doctors' services", "Staff's services", "Hospital facilities", and "Affordability". The database containing aspect-based ratings of the hospitals will be of great value to the patients by allowing them to compare and select the best hospital based on the optimum fit of the aspects of their preference.

Country Image in COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of China.

Country image has a profound influence on international relations and economic development. In the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, countries and their people display different reactions, resulting in diverse perceived images among foreign public. Therefore, in this article, we take China as a specific and typical case and investigate its image with aspect-based sentiment analysis on a large-scale Twitter dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore country image in such a fine-grained way. To perform the analysis, we first build a manually-labeled Twitter dataset with aspect-level sentiment annotations. Afterward, we conduct the aspect-based sentiment analysis with BERT to explore the image of China. We discover an overall sentiment change from non-negative to negative in the general public, and explain it with the increasing mentions of negative ideology-related aspects and decreasing mentions of non-negative fact-based aspects. Further investigations into different groups of Twitter users, including U.S. Congress members, English media, and social bots, reveal different patterns in their attitudes toward China. This article provides a deeper understanding of the changing image of China in COVID-19 pandemic. Our research also demonstrates how aspect-based sentiment analysis can be applied in social science researches to deliver valuable insights.