Examination of community sentiment dynamics due to covid-19 pandemic: a case study from Australia
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The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused
unprecedented impacts to people's daily life around the world. Various measures
and policies such as lock-down and social-distancing are implemented by
governments to combat the disease during the pandemic period. These measures
and policies as well as virus itself may cause different mental health issues
to people such as depression, anxiety, sadness, etc. In this paper, we exploit
the massive text data posted by Twitter users to analyse the sentiment dynamics
of people living in the state of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia during the
pandemic period. Different from the existing work that mostly focuses the
country-level and static sentiment analysis, we analyse the sentiment dynamics
at the fine-grained local government areas (LGAs). Based on the analysis of
around 94 million tweets that posted by around 183 thousand users located at
different LGAs in NSW in five months, we found that people in NSW showed an
overall positive sentimental polarity and the COVID-19 pandemic decreased the
overall positive sentimental polarity during the pandemic period. The
fine-grained analysis of sentiment in LGAs found that despite the dominant
positive sentiment most of days during the study period, some LGAs experienced
significant sentiment changes from positive to negative. This study also
analysed the sentimental dynamics delivered by the hot topics in Twitter such
as government policies (e.g. the Australia's JobKeeper program, lock-down,
social-distancing) as well as the focused social events (e.g. the Ruby Princess
Cruise). The results showed that the policies and events did affect people's
overall sentiment, and they affected people's overall sentiment differently at
different stages.
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