Users opinion and emotion understanding in social media regarding COVID-19 vaccine

ABSTRACT

Online social platforms or social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become popular platforms for a public discussion about social topics. Recent studies show that there is a growing tendency for people to talk about COVID-19 pandemic in these online channels. The rapid growth of the infected cases by COVID-19 pandemic makes a lots of anxiety and fear among people. With the recent released of Pfizer vaccine, people start posting a lot of rumors regarding the safety concerns of the vaccine, especially among the elderly people. The aim of this study is to bring out the fact that tweets containing all pertinent details about the COVID-19 vaccine and provides an analysis and understanding of users emotions regarding the recent release of COVID-19 vaccine. This study starts with the collection of tweets related to COVID-19 vaccine and then cleaning the dataset from redundant tweets. In this study, we use Twitter API and Web Scraping techniques to obtain a sample of 50,000 tweets talking about COVID-19 vaccine.Further, The analysis of users emotions is achieved by manually labeling and classifying the tweets to either positive or negative. Then, a deep learning based model is used to train the data and classify the people opinion about COVID-19 vaccine. The experimental results illustrate that high percentage of people have shown a positive attitude towards COVID1-19 vaccine. The proposed method is validated over Twitter datasets and the results also demonstrate that use of deep learning classifier can successfully improve the accuracy of people emotions analysis with an accuracy up to 98% for training set and the accuracy for testing set is 73%.