Word frequency and sentiment analysis of twitter messages during Coronavirus pandemic

The Coronavirus pandemic has taken the world by storm as also the social media. As the awareness about the ailment increased, so did messages, videos and posts acknowledging its presence. The social networking site, Twitter, demonstrated similar effect with the number of posts related to coronavirus showing an unprecedented growth in a very short span of time. This paper presents a statistical analysis of the twitter messages related to this disease posted since January 2020. Two types of empirical studies have been performed. The first is on word frequency and the second on sentiments of the individual tweet messages. Inspection of the word frequency is useful in characterizing the patterns or trends in the words used on the site. This would also reflect on the psychology of the twitter users at this critical juncture. Unigram, bigram and trigram frequencies have been modeled by power law distribution. The results have been validated by Sum of Square Error (SSE), R2 and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). High values of R2 and low values of SSE and RMSE lay the grounds for the goodness of fit of this model. Sentiment analysis has been conducted to understand the general attitudes of the twitter users at this time. Both tweets by general public and WHO were part of the corpus. The results showed that the majority of the tweets had a positive polarity and only about 15% were negative.