Classification of Covid-19 Tweets Using Deep Learning Techniques

Sunagar, P.; Kanavalli, A.; Poornima, V.; Hemanth, V. M.; Sreeram, K.; Shivakumar, K. S.

In this digital era, there is an exponential growth of text-based content in the electronic world. Data as texts exist in the form of documents, social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc., logs, sensor data, and emails. Twitter is a social platform where users express their views on various aspects in a day to day life. Twitter produces over 500 million tweets daily that is 6000 tweets per second. Twitter data is, by definition, very noisy and unstructured in nature. Text classifications based on the machine learning techniques have problems like poor generalization ability and sparsity dimension explosion. Classifiers based on deep learning techniques are implemented to improve accuracy to overcome shortcomings of machine learning techniques and to avoid feature extraction processes and have high prediction accuracy and strong learning ability. In this work, the classification of tweets is performed on Covid-19 dataset by implementing deep learning techniques namely Convolution Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Recurrent Convolution Neural Network (RCNN), Recurrent Neural Network with Long Short Term Memory (RNN+LSTM), and Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory with Attention (BI-LSTM + Attention). The algorithms are implemented using two-word embedding techniques namely Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe) and Word2Vec. RNN with Bidirectional LSTM model has performed better than all the classifiers considered. It has classified the text with an accuracy of 93% and above when used with GloVe and Word2Vec. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.