Inquest of Current Situation in Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule Using Sentiment Analysis and Volume Analysis

Microblogging websites and social media platforms serve as a potential source for mining public opinions and sentiments on a variety of subjects including the prevailing situations in war-afflicted countries. In particular, Twitter has a large number of geotagged tweets that make the analysis of sentiments across time and space possible. This study performs volume analysis and sentiment analysis using LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and text mining over two datasets collected for different periods. To increase the adequacy and efficacy of the sentiment analysis, a hybrid feature engineering approach is proposed that elevates the performance of machine learning models. Geotagged tweets are used for volume analysis indicating that the highest number of tweets is originated from India, the US, the UK, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Analysis of positive and negative tweets reveals that negative tweets are mostly originated from India and the US. On the contrary, positive tweets belong to Pakistan and Afghanistan. LDA is used for topic modeling on two datasets containing tweets about the current situation after the Taliban take control of Afghanistan. Topics extracted through LDA suggest that majority of the Afghanistan people seem satisfied with the Taliban’s takeover while the topics from negative tweets reveal that issues discussed in negative tweets are related to the US concerns in Afghanistan. Sentiment analysis over two different datasets indicates that the trend of the sentiments has been shifted positively over three weeks.