Bilingual Emotion Analysis on Social Media throughout the COVID19 Pandemic in Portugal

Trifan, A.; Matos, S.; Morgado, P.; Oliveira, J. L.

This paper presents preliminary work on the topic of emotion analysis on Twitter, in the context of the coronavirus pandemic in Portugal. We collected, curated and analyzed covid-related tweets of users in Portugal in order to understand the evolution of the six basic emotions reflected in these tweets. We analyzed tweets written in both English and Portuguese. In this first step of our work we correlate this information with key events of the evolution of the pandemic in Portugal during March, which was the most critical period in Portugal. We do so in an attempt to estimate the online manifestation of the psychological toll that this pandemic has on the overall well-being status of the general population. Our findings show that the sentiment analysis of covid-related tweets is consistent with our hypothesis that negative emotions would intensify as the pandemic progressed. The preliminary results obtained stand as proof of concept that the analysis of real-time tweets or other social media messages through sentiment analysis can be an important tool for behavioural and well-being tracking.