Public Sentiment on Governmental COVID-19 Measures in Dutch Social Media

Shihan Wang, Marijn Schraagen, Erik Tjong Kim Sang, Mehdi Dastani


Abstract
Public sentiment (the opinion, attitude or feeling that the public expresses) is a factor of interest for government, as it directly influences the implementation of policies. Given the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 crisis, having an up-to-date representation of public sentiment on governmental measures and announcements is crucial. In this paper, we analyse Dutch public sentiment on governmental COVID-19 measures from text data collected across three online media sources (Twitter, Reddit and Nu.nl) from February to September 2020. We apply sentiment analysis methods to analyse polarity over time, as well as to identify stance towards two specific pandemic policies regarding social distancing and wearing face masks. The presented preliminary results provide valuable insights into the narratives shown in vast social media text data, which help understand the influence of COVID-19 measures on the general public.
Anthology ID:
2020.nlpcovid19-2.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Karin Verspoor, Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, Michael Conway, Berry de Bruijn, Mark Dredze, Rada Mihalcea, Byron Wallace
Venue:
NLP-COVID19
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcovid19-2.17
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.nlpcovid19-2.17
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shihan Wang, Marijn Schraagen, Erik Tjong Kim Sang, and Mehdi Dastani. 2020. Public Sentiment on Governmental COVID-19 Measures in Dutch Social Media. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Public Sentiment on Governmental COVID-19 Measures in Dutch Social Media (Wang et al., NLP-COVID19 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2020.nlpcovid19-2.17.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939855