Machine Learning Techniques for Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19-Related Twitter Data

On Twitter, COVID-19 is a highly discussed topic. People worldwide have used Twitter to express their viewpoints and feelings during the pandemic. Previous research has focused on particular topics such as the public’s sentiment during the lockdown, their opinion on governmental measures, or their stance towards COVID-19 vaccines. However, until today, there is no comprehensive overview that presents possible areas of application for sentiment analysis of COVID-19 Twitter data. Therefore, this study reveals how sentiment analysis can provide relevant insights for managing the pandemic by applying a behavioral and social science lens. In this context, our systematic literature review focuses on machine learning-based sentiment analysis techniques and compares the best-performing classification algorithms for COVID-19-related Twitter data. We performed a search in five databases, which are: IEEE Xplore DL, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, ACM DL, and AIS Electronic Library. This search resulted in 40 papers published between October 2019 and January 2022 that used sentiment analysis to evaluate the public opinion on COVID-19-related topics, which we further investigated. Our research indicates that the best performing models in terms of accuracy are ensemble models that comprise various machine learning classifiers. Especially BERT and RoBERTa models provide the most promising results when fine-tuned on Twitter data. Our study aims to combine machine learning-based sentiment analysis and insights from social and behavioral science to provide decision-makers and public health experts with guidance on the application of sentiment analysis in the fight against the spread of COVID-19.