The COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on the global economy and health. While the pandemic continues to cause casualties in millions, many countries have gone under lockdown. During this period, people have to stay within walls and become more addicted towards social networks. They express their emotions and sympathy via these online platforms. Thus, popular social media (Twitter and Facebook) have become rich sources of information for Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis on COVID-19-related issues. We have used Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis to anticipate the polarity of public opinion underlying different aspects from Twitter during lockdown and stepwise unlock phases. The goal of this study is to find the feelings of Indians about the lockdown initiative taken by the Government of India to stop the spread of Coronavirus. India-specific COVID-19 tweets have been annotated, for analysing the sentiment of common public. To classify the Twitter data set a deep learning model has been proposed which has achieved accuracies of 82.35% for Lockdown and 83.33% for Unlock data set. The suggested method outperforms many of the contemporary approaches (long short-term memory, Bi-directional long short-term memory, Gated Recurrent Unit etc.). This study highlights the public sentiment on lockdown and stepwise unlocks, imposed by the Indian Government on various aspects during the Corona outburst.
Keywords: COVID‐19; aspect based sentiment analysis; bi‐directional gated recurrent unit; deep learning; k‐means clustering; multi‐criteria decision‐making; natural language processing.
© 2022 The Authors. CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology and Chongqing University of Technology.