COVID-19 Sensing: Negative Sentiment Analysis on Social Media in China via BERT Model

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses massive challenges for the world. Public sentiment analysis during the outbreak provides insightful information in making appropriate public health responses. On Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese social media, posts with negative sentiment are valuable in analyzing public concerns. 999,978 randomly selected COVID-19 related Weibo posts from 1 January 2020 to 18 February 2020 are analyzed. Specifically, the unsupervised BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model is adopted to classify sentiment categories (positive, neutral, and negative) and TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) model is used to summarize the topics of posts. Trend analysis and thematic analysis are conducted to identify characteristics of negative sentiment. In general, the fine-tuned BERT conducts sentiment classification with considerable accuracy. Besides, topics extracted by TF-IDF precisely convey characteristics of posts regarding COVID-19. As a result, we observed that people concern four aspects regarding COVID-19, the virus Origin (Gamey Food, 3.08%; Bat, 2.70%; Conspiracy Theory, 1.43%), Symptom (Fever, 2.13%; Cough, 1.19%), Production Activity (Go to Work, 1.94%; Resume Work, 1.12%; School New Semester Beginning, 1.06%) and Public Health Control (Temperature Taking, 1.39%; Coronavirus Cover-up, 1.26%; City Shutdown, 1.09%). Results from Weibo posts provide constructive instructions on public health responses, that transparent information sharing and scientific guidance might help alleviate public concerns.