Statistically Evaluating Social Media Sentiment Trends towards COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions with Event Studies

Jingcheng Niu, Erin Rees, Victoria Ng, Gerald Penn


Abstract
In the midst of a global pandemic, understanding the public’s opinion of their government’s policy-level, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) is a crucial component of the health-policy-making process. Prior work on CoViD-19 NPI sentiment analysis by the epidemiological community has proceeded without a method for properly attributing sentiment changes to events, an ability to distinguish the influence of various events across time, a coherent model for predicting the public’s opinion of future events of the same sort, nor even a means of conducting significance tests. We argue here that this urgently needed evaluation method does already exist. In the financial sector, event studies of the fluctuations in a publicly traded company’s stock price are commonplace for determining the effects of earnings announcements, product placements, etc. The same method is suitable for analysing temporal sentiment variation in the light of policy-level NPIs. We provide a case study of Twitter sentiment towards policy-level NPIs in Canada. Our results confirm a generally positive connection between the announcements of NPIs and Twitter sentiment, and we document a promising correlation between the results of this study and a public-health survey of popular compliance with NPIs.
Anthology ID:
2021.smm4h-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Social Media Mining for Health (#SMM4H) Workshop and Shared Task
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Arjun Magge, Ari Klein, Antonio Miranda-Escalada, Mohammed Ali Al-garadi, Ilseyar Alimova, Zulfat Miftahutdinov, Eulalia Farre-Maduell, Salvador Lima Lopez, Ivan Flores, Karen O'Connor, Davy Weissenbacher, Elena Tutubalina, Abeed Sarker, Juan M Banda, Martin Krallinger, Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez
Venue:
SMM4H
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–6
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.smm4h-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.smm4h-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingcheng Niu, Erin Rees, Victoria Ng, and Gerald Penn. 2021. Statistically Evaluating Social Media Sentiment Trends towards COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions with Event Studies. In Proceedings of the Sixth Social Media Mining for Health (#SMM4H) Workshop and Shared Task, pages 1–6, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Statistically Evaluating Social Media Sentiment Trends towards COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions with Event Studies (Niu et al., SMM4H 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.smm4h-1.1.pdf
Code
 frankniujc/covid_sentiment_analysis