Emotion Analysis of Arabic Tweets during COVID-19 Pandemic in Saudi Arabia

Social media has emerged as an effective platform to investigate people’s opinion and feeling towards crisis situations. Along with Coronavirus crisis, range of different emotions reveal, including anger, sadness, fear, trust, and anticipation. In this paper, we investigate public’s emotional responses associated with this pandemic using Twitter as platform to perform our analysis. We investigate how emotional perspective vary regarding lockdown ending in Saudi Arabia. We develop an emotion detection method to classify tweets into standard eight emotions. Furthermore, we present insights into the changes in the intensity of the emotions over time. Our finding shows that joy and anticipation are the most dominant among all emotions. While people express positive emotions, there are tones of fear, anger, and sadness revealed. Moreover, this research might help to better understand public behaviors to gain insight and make the proper decisions.

@article{Alhazmi2020,
  title     = {Emotion Analysis of Arabic Tweets during COVID-19 Pandemic in Saudi Arabia},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {11},
  number    = {10},
  year      = {2020},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Huda Alhazmi and Manal Alharbi},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0111077},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0111077}
}