A Systematic Spatial and Temporal Sentiment Analysis on Geo-Tweets

Sentiment affects every aspect of people's lives and has strong impact on their mental health. This paper explores local users' sentiments extracted from Geo-tweets data from January to December 2016, analyzed in the spatial and temporal perspective. Because of large amount of noisy data and complicated procedure of extracting local user, a workflow is created, facilitating more researchers to reproduce, replicate or extend the procedures using similar Geo-tweet dataset. The workflow is sharing at Harvard Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/6N9VUF). Using the processed data, each tweet's sentiment is classified according to the content. Then, the overall temporal variations of total number of positive, neural, and negative sentiments are analyzed on a monthly, daily and hourly level. From a spatial perspective, the Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) statistical method is employed to discover the spatial clusters. In order to explore the content of positive sentiments, this paper applies the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to classify the Geo-tweets with positive sentiments into different topics. Combining the geospatial information with the topics, some patterns are found which demonstrate the associations between the nature of Twitter content and the characteristics of places and users. For example, weekend events and friend and family gatherings are the time that users prefer to post positive tweets. In the western part of US, users tend to post more photos to share the great moment on Twitter than other parts of the US.