TY - GEN
T1 - An Analysis of Users Engagement on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic
AU - Alshamrani, Sultan
AU - Abusnaina, Ahmed
AU - Abuhamad, Mohammed
AU - Lee, Anho
AU - Nyang, Dae Hun
AU - Mohaisen, David
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by NRF grant 2016K1A1A2912757 (Global Research Lab) and a gift from NVIDIA. S. Alshamrani was supported by a scholarship from the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic raised health and economic concerns. With social distancing along with other measures that are enforced in an attempt to limit the spread of the virus, our life has dramatically changed. During this period, the web and social media platforms have become the main medium for communication, expression, and entertainment. Such platforms are a rich source of information, enabling researchers to better understand how the pandemic affected the users’ everyday life, including interaction with and perception of different topics. In this study, we focus on understanding the shift in the behavior of Twitter users, a major social media platform used by millions daily to share thoughts and discussions. In particular, we collected 26 million tweets for a period of seven months, three months before the pandemic outbreak, and four months after. Using topic modeling and state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, the trending topics within the tweets on monthly-bases, including their sentiment and user’s perception, were analyzed. This study highlights the change of the public behavior and concerns during the pandemic. Users expressed their concerns on health services, with an increase of 59.24% in engagement, and economical effects of the pandemic (34.43% increase). Topics such as online shopping have had a remarkable increase in popularity, perhaps due to the social distancing, while crime and sports topics witnessed a decrease. Overall, various topics related to COVID-19 have witnessed an improved sentiment, alluding to users adoption to the pandemic and associated topics of the public discourse.
AB - The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic raised health and economic concerns. With social distancing along with other measures that are enforced in an attempt to limit the spread of the virus, our life has dramatically changed. During this period, the web and social media platforms have become the main medium for communication, expression, and entertainment. Such platforms are a rich source of information, enabling researchers to better understand how the pandemic affected the users’ everyday life, including interaction with and perception of different topics. In this study, we focus on understanding the shift in the behavior of Twitter users, a major social media platform used by millions daily to share thoughts and discussions. In particular, we collected 26 million tweets for a period of seven months, three months before the pandemic outbreak, and four months after. Using topic modeling and state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, the trending topics within the tweets on monthly-bases, including their sentiment and user’s perception, were analyzed. This study highlights the change of the public behavior and concerns during the pandemic. Users expressed their concerns on health services, with an increase of 59.24% in engagement, and economical effects of the pandemic (34.43% increase). Topics such as online shopping have had a remarkable increase in popularity, perhaps due to the social distancing, while crime and sports topics witnessed a decrease. Overall, various topics related to COVID-19 have witnessed an improved sentiment, alluding to users adoption to the pandemic and associated topics of the public discourse.
KW - COVID-19
KW - Coronavirus
KW - NLP
KW - Sentiment analysis
KW - Topic modeling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85101414625&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-66046-8_7
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-66046-8_7
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85101414625
SN - 9783030660451
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 73
EP - 86
BT - Computational Data and Social Networks - 9th International Conference, CSoNet 2020, Proceedings
A2 - Chellappan, Sriram
A2 - Choo, Kim-Kwang Raymond
A2 - Phan, NhatHai
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 11 December 2020 through 13 December 2020
ER -