A Sentiment Analysis Approach to Discover Public Panic: Based on Weibo Covid-19 Data

Background: Weibo is a Twitter-like micro-blog platform in China where people post their real-life events as well as express their feelings in short texts. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of people have expressed their concerns and worries about the outbreak via Weibo, showing the existence of public panic. Methods: This paper comes up with a sentiment analysis approach to discover public panic. First, we used Octoparse to obtain Weibo posts about the hot topic Covid-19 Pandemic. Second, we break down those sentences into independent words and clean the data by removing stop words. Then, we use the sentiment score function that deals with negative words, adverbs, and sentiment words to get the sentiment score of each Weibo post. Results: We observe the distribution of sentiment scores and get the benchmark to evaluate public panic. Also, we apply the same process to test the mass sentiment under other topics to test the efficiency of the sentiment function, which shows that our function works well.