The 21st century has seen a lot of innovations, among which included the advancement of social media platforms. These platforms brought about interactions between people and changed how news is transmitted, with people now able to voice their opinion as opposed to before where only the reporters were speaking. Social media has become the most influential source of speech freedom and emotions on their platforms. Anyone can express emotions using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. The raw data is increasing daily for every culture and field of life, so there is a need to process this raw data to get meaningful information. If any nation or country wants to know their people's needs, there should be mined data showing the actual meaning of the people's emotions. The COVID-19 pandemic came with many problems going beyond the virus itself, as there was mass hysteria and the spread of wrong information on social media. This problem put the whole world into turmoil and research was done to find a way to mitigate the spread of incorrect news. In this research study, we have proposed a model of detecting genuine news related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Arabic Text using sentiment-based data from Twitter for Gulf countries. The proposed sentiment analysis model uses Machine Learning and SMOTE for imbalanced dataset handling. The result showed the people in Gulf countries had a negative sentiment during COVID-19 pandemic. This work was done so government authorities can easily learn directly from people all across the world about the spread of COVID-19 and take appropriate actions in efforts to control it.
Keywords: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE); machine learning - ML; natural language processing; public health; sentiment analysis (SA).
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