Co’FeeL: An Insightful COVID’19 Emotion Analysis based on Worldwide Twitter Data and Advanced Deep Learning Techniques (Preprint)
UNSTRUCTURED The coronavirus outbreak has altered the complete living pattern of human beings across the globe. It has disrupted the way we live, work, and play. The preventive norm of social distancing has created a void in our society’s social fabric. It has affected us not only physically or financially but has created a greater impact on our emotional wellbeing as well. This distress in our emotional quotient is a result of multiple factors such as financial implications, family member’s behavior, and support, country-specific lockdown protocols, media influence, fear of a pandemic, etc. For efficient pandemic management, there is an urgent need to understand these emotional variations among the masses, as they would provide great insights regarding the public sentiments towards the government pandemic management policies. It will also bring to light the weaker emotional sections of the masses, which we should be strengthening to face further situations more effectively. During this time, more and more people have used various social media platforms such as Twitter to stay connected and express their feelings and concerns. In this paper, we have collected and analyzed over 1 million tweets of the last five months (February-June 2020) using advanced deep learning techniques such as Transfer Learning and Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa) to study countrywide variations in emotions. We have categorized emotions into eight classes viz. anger, depression, enthusiasm, hate, relief, sadness, surprise, and worry. The outcome of this analysis, which is represented in the form of graphs, provides insights into how emotions have changed over time for various countries. These insights can be very useful not only in formulating effective pandemic management strategies but also to devise predictive strategies for the emotional wellbeing of the country as a whole and citizens in particular for future distress events.