Coronavirus public sentiment analysis with BERT deep learning

Sammanfattning: Microblog has become a central platform where people express their thoughts and opinions toward public events in China. With the sudden outbreak of coronavirus, the posts related to coronavirus are usually followed by a burst immediately in microblog volume, which provides a great opportunity to explore public sentiment about the events. In this context, sentiment analysis is helpful to explore how coronavirus affects public opinions. Deep learning has become a very popular technique for sentiment analysis. This thesis uses Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a pre-trained unsupervised language representation model based on deep learning, to generate initial token embeddings that are further tuned by a neural network model on a supervised corpus, a sentiment classifier is constructed. We utilize data recently made available by the government of Beijing which contains 1 million blog posts from January 1 to February 20, 2020. Also, the model developed in this thesis can be used to track the sentiment variation with Weibo microblog data in the future. At the final stage, the variation of public sentiment is analyzed and presented with visualization charts of preformed people sentiment variation with the development of coronavirus in China. Comparison of the results between labeled data and all data is performed in order to explore how thoughts and opinions evolve in time. The result shows a significant growth of the negative sentiment on January 20 when a lockdown started in Wuhan, and afterward the growth becomes slower. Around February 7 when doctor Wenliang Li died, the number of negative sentiments reached its peak.