Open AccessA performance comparison of supervised machine learning models for Covid-19 tweets sentiment analysis
Author(s) -
Furqan Rustam,
Madiha Khalid,
Waqar Aslam,
Vaibhav Rupapara,
Arif Mehmood,
Gyu Sang Choi
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0245909
Subject(s) - computer science , artificial intelligence , sentiment analysis , machine learning , preprocessor , f1 score , precision and recall , set (abstract data type) , feature (linguistics) , supervised learning , deep learning , feature extraction , data pre processing , natural language processing , data mining , artificial neural network , philosophy , linguistics , programming language
The spread of Covid-19 has resulted in worldwide health concerns. Social media is increasingly used to share news and opinions about it. A realistic assessment of the situation is necessary to utilize resources optimally and appropriately. In this research, we perform Covid-19 tweets sentiment analysis using a supervised machine learning approach. Identification of Covid-19 sentiments from tweets would allow informed decisions for better handling the current pandemic situation. The used dataset is extracted from Twitter using IDs as provided by the IEEE data port. Tweets are extracted by an in-house built crawler that uses the Tweepy library. The dataset is cleaned using the preprocessing techniques and sentiments are extracted using the TextBlob library. The contribution of this work is the performance evaluation of various machine learning classifiers using our proposed feature set. This set is formed by concatenating the bag-of-words and the term frequency-inverse document frequency. Tweets are classified as positive, neutral, or negative. Performance of classifiers is evaluated on the accuracy, precision, recall, and F 1 score. For completeness, further investigation is made on the dataset using the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture of the deep learning model. The results show that Extra Trees Classifiers outperform all other models by achieving a 0.93 accuracy score using our proposed concatenated features set. The LSTM achieves low accuracy as compared to machine learning classifiers. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed feature set, the results are compared with the Vader sentiment analysis technique based on the GloVe feature extraction approach.