International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering

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Analyzing the Impact of COVID-19 on Economy from the Perspective of User’s Reviews

Authors :

Fatemeh Salmani¹ Hamed Vahdat-Nejad² Hamideh Hajiabadi³

1- Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Birjand, Iran 2- Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Birjand, Iran 3- Department of Computer Engineering, Birjand University of Technology, Iran

Keywords :

Covid-19, Economy, Sentiment analysis, Social network, Natural language processing, Pandemic

Abstract :

One of the most important incidents in the world in the last year is the outbreak of the Coronavirus. Users on social networks publish a large number of comments about this event. These comments contain important hidden information of public’ opinion toward this pandemic. In this study, a large number of coronavirus-related tweets are considered and analyzed using natural language processing and information retrieval science. Initially, the location of the tweets is determined using a dictionary prepared through the Geo Names geographic database, which contains detailed and complete information of places such as city names, streets, and postal codes. Then, using a large dictionary prepared from the terms of economics, related tweets are extracted and sentiments corresponded to tweets are analyzed with the help of the RoBERTa language-based model, which has high accuracy and good performance. Finally, the frequency chart of tweets related to economy and their sentiment scores (positive and negative tweets) is plotted over time for the entire world and the top 10 economies. From the analysis of the charts, we learn that the reason for publishing economic tweets is not only the increase in the number of people infected with the coronavirus but also imposed restrictions and lockdowns in countries. The consequences of these restrictions include the loss of millions of jobs and the economic downturn.