Computer Science > Computation and Language
[Submitted on 30 Nov 2021 (this version), latest version 18 Sep 2023 (v3)]
Title:Sentiment Analysis and Effect of COVID-19 Pandemic using College SubReddit Data
View PDFAbstract:The COVID-19 pandemic has affected societies and human health and well-being in various ways. In this study, we collected Reddit data from 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2020 (pandemic) from the subreddits communities associated with 8 universities, applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and trained graphical neural networks with social media data, to study how the pandemic has affected people's emotions and psychological states compared to the pre-pandemic era. Specifically, we first applied a pre-trained Robustly Optimized BERT pre-training approach (RoBERTa) to learn embedding from the semantic information of Reddit messages and trained a graph attention network (GAT) for sentiment classification. The usage of GAT allows us to leverage the relational information among the messages during training. We then applied subgroup-adaptive model stacking to combine the prediction probabilities from RoBERTa and GAT to yield the final classification on sentiment. With the manually labeled and model-predicted sentiment labels on the collected data, we applied a generalized linear mixed-effects model to estimate the effects of pandemic and online teaching on people's sentiment in a statistically significant manner. The results suggest the odds of negative sentiments in 2020 is $14.6\%$ higher than the odds in 2019 ($p$-value $<0.001$), and the odds of negative sentiments are $41.6\%$ higher with in-person teaching than with online teaching in 2020 ($p$-value $=0.037$) in the studied population.
Submission history
From: Tian Yan [view email][v1] Tue, 30 Nov 2021 19:15:06 UTC (1,933 KB)
[v2] Thu, 2 Jun 2022 08:23:03 UTC (809 KB)
[v3] Mon, 18 Sep 2023 08:10:41 UTC (32 KB)
Current browse context:
cs.CL
References & Citations
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?)
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.