Opinion Mining Approach: To Understand Public Reactions towards Reopening of Schools and Colleges/Universities in India

The psychological, developmental, and educational consequences of the prolonged shutdown and digital shift to e-learning methods are being felt in every family throughout India. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of social media platforms such as Twitter has increased as people turn to it to express their thoughts, anxieties, and concerns. As a result, I conducted sentiment analysis on two sets of data related to the reopening of schools in India and the reopening of colleges/universities in India. The tweets were retrieved from the social media site Twitter using 9 keywords relating to the reopening of schools and colleges/universities. The Tweepy module in Python was used for the extraction process. A total of 2,494 tweets over the course of 16 days, from December 8th, 2021 to December 23 rd, 2021 were gathered. Later a total of 1,510 tweets were evaluated once all of the pre-processing steps were done. The sentimental analysis was carried out using 2 unsupervised Lexicon-based models - the Vader Lexicon and the SentiWordNet Lexicon method. In this study, the outcomes of both techniques are highlighted. The main aim of this research is to gauge the sentiments of the public reactions expressed towards the reopening of schools and colleges/universities. These findings may be a beneficial aspect to consider while the policy-making process. The results of this study suggest that by using both approaches there was a higher number of positive tweets which may indicate that citizens in India are in the favor of schools and colleges reopening. This study can further be expanded by incorporating public viewpoints expressed on various other social networking platforms and can be extended to create a comprehensive dashboard with state-wise catered guidance, instructions, and resources for safely reopening schools and colleges in India.