%0 Conference Proceedings %T Cross-language sentiment analysis of European Twitter messages during the COVID-19 pandemic %A Kruspe, Anna %A Häberle, Matthias %A Kuhn, Iona %A Zhu, Xiao Xiang %Y Verspoor, Karin %Y Cohen, Kevin Bretonnel %Y Dredze, Mark %Y Ferrara, Emilio %Y May, Jonathan %Y Munro, Robert %Y Paris, Cecile %Y Wallace, Byron %S Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 at ACL 2020 %D 2020 %8 July %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Online %F kruspe-etal-2020-cross %X In this paper, we analyze Twitter messages (tweets) collected during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe with regard to their sentiment. This is implemented with a neural network for sentiment analysis using multilingual sentence embeddings. We separate the results by country of origin, and correlate their temporal development with events in those countries. This allows us to study the effect of the situation on people’s moods. We see, for example, that lockdown announcements correlate with a deterioration of mood in almost all surveyed countries, which recovers within a short time span. %U https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcovid19-acl.14