An Approach to Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data on the Goods and Services Tax

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) was introduced in India as an Indirect Tax on July 1st, 2017 with a goal of being a game changer for the Indian Economy increasing the Gross Domestic Product of the nation and reducing prices. This newly introduced taxation system was received positively by the leading giants from the business and entertainment industry. The opposition, however, boycotted the launch of GST as they found it to be problematic for the lower and middle-class citizens since according to them, GST would increase the cost of daily usage goods and reduce the cost of only luxury products. Amidst this mixed reaction, GST completed 100 days on October 8th, 2017. Using Data Mining tools, this research paper aims to analyse the varying trends in public reaction on GST over a period of these 100 days, by collecting data from social media platform like Twitter. A thorough geographical study across the major Metro-Politian areas of India was carried out using R as the Data Analysis platform and the sentiments of people were analysed.