Abstract

COVID-19 has created a major public health problem worldwide and other problems such as economic crisis, unemployment, mental distress, etc. The pandemic is deadly in the world and involves many people not only with infection but also with problems, stress, wonder, fear, resentment, and hatred. Twitter is a highly influential social media platform and a significant source of health-related information, news, opinion and public sentiment where information is shared by both citizens and government sources. Therefore, an effective analysis of COVID-19 tweets is essential for policymakers to make wise decisions. However, it is challenging to identify interesting and useful content from major streams of text to understand people’s feelings about the important topics of the COVID-19 tweets. In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework for analyzing topic-based sentiments by extracting key topics with significant labels and classifying positive, negative, or neutral tweets on each topic to quickly find common topics of public opinion and COVID-19-related attitudes. While building our model, we take into account hybridization of Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) structures for sentiment analysis to achieve our goal. The experimental results show that our topic identification method extracts better topic labels and the sentiment analysis approach using our proposed hybrid deep learning model achieves the highest accuracy compared to traditional models.