Tweets Emotions Analysis of Community Activities Restriction as COVID-19 Policy in Indonesia Using Support Vector Machine

ABSTRACT

With the rising number of COVID-19 cases in Indonesia, the government has implemented the Imposition of Restrictions on Emergency Community Activities (Pemberlakuan Pembatasan Kegiatan Masyarakat - PPKM) as Indonesia's COVID-19 policy. Several controversies and protests have colored the implementation of this emergency policy. Some netizens on Twitter voice their opinions about the policy in their tweets. Emotions in tweets can be recognized through text-based emotion detection or emotion analysis. However, text-based emotion detection is a challenging task. One of the main issues in classifying text with a machine learning-based approach deals with the feature dimensions. As a result, appropriate methods for accurately identifying emotion based on the text are required. The research studies an emotions analysis task on Indonesians' PPKM-related tweets to understand their emotional state while implementing the PPKM. The machine learning classification algorithms used are Support Vector Machine (SVM) and random forest. The total number of tweets is 4,401. The results show that SVM with linear kernel function combined with the TF-IDF and Chi-Square methods outperforms other classifiers with an accuracy of 0.7528. The accuracy value is higher than those obtained by previous studies. Moreover, the results of the emotion classification on PPKM tweets reveal that most Indonesians are unhappy with the implementation of the PPKM policy. © 2023 Bina Nusantara University. All rights reserved.