How Australians Are Coping with the Longest Restrictions: An Exploratory Analysis of Emotion and Sentiment from Tweets

ABSTRACT

Australia is one of the nations having the most extended international border closure and lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This provides a unique opportunity to explore and understand the emotion and sentiment in the tweets posted by Australians. To utilise this opportunity, tweets from Twitter were collected since the beginning of the pandemic till the 30th of October 2021. Search queries were generated to get COVID-19 and lockdown-related tweets that returned any tweets with the relevant tags. After collecting the tweets, several text pre-processing techniques were applied. Later, sentiment analysis and emotion detection were performed on the pre-processed tweets. Lastly, results were aggregated together and the findings were discussed. Findings from this study suggested that sentiments and emotions fluctuated depending on time and region. The understanding of people’s sentiment and emotion towards lockdown presented in this paper may help the policymakers in decision making in future especially with the new variant (Omicron) of COVID-19. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.