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Real-Time Infoveillance of Moroccan Social Media Users' Sentiments towards the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Management
| Content Provider | MDPI |
|---|---|
| Author | Ghanem, Abdelghani Asaad, Chaimae Hafidi, Hakim Moukafih, Youness Guermah, Bassma Sbihi, Nada Zakroum, Mehdi Ghogho, Mounir Dairi, Meriem Cherqaoui, Mariam Baina, Karim |
| Copyright Year | 2021 |
| Description | The impact of COVID-19 on socio-economic fronts, public health related aspects and human interactions is undeniable. Amidst the social distancing protocols and the stay-at-home regulations imposed in several countries, citizens took to social media to cope with the emotional turmoil of the pandemic and respond to government issued regulations. In order to uncover the collective emotional response of Moroccan citizens to this pandemic and its effects, we use topic modeling to identify the most dominant COVID-19 related topics of interest amongst Moroccan social media users and sentiment/emotion analysis to gain insights into their reactions to various impactful events. The collected data consists of COVID-19 related comments posted on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube and on the websites of two popular online news outlets in Morocco (Hespress and Hibapress) throughout the year 2020. The comments are expressed in Moroccan Dialect (MD) or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). To perform topic modeling and sentiment classification, we built a first Universal Language Model for the Moroccan Dialect (MD-ULM) using available corpora, which we have fine-tuned using our COVID-19 dataset. We show that our method significantly outperforms classical machine learning classification methods in Topic Modeling, Emotion Recognition and Polar Sentiment Analysis. To provide real-time infoveillance of these sentiments, we developed an online platform to automate the execution of the different processes, and in particular regular data collection. This platform is meant to be a decision-making assistance tool for COVID-19 mitigation and management in Morocco. |
| Starting Page | 12172 |
| e-ISSN | 16604601 |
| DOI | 10.3390/ijerph182212172 |
| Journal | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health |
| Issue Number | 22 |
| Volume Number | 18 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | MDPI |
| Publisher Date | 2021-11-19 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health Information and Library Science Medical Informatics Covid-19 Emotion Analysis Machine Learning Polar Sentiment Analysis Topic Modeling Universal Language Model for Moroccan Dialect |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
