Users' Feedback on COVID-19 Lockdown Documentary: An Emotion Analysis and Topic Modeling Analysis

Conducting emotion analysis and generating users' feedback from social media platforms may help understand their emotional responses to video products, such as a documentary on the lockdown of Wuhan during COVID-19. The results of emotion analysis could be used to make further user recommendations for marketing purposes. In our study, we try to understand how users respond to a documentary through YouTube comments. We chose “The lockdown: One month in Wuhan” YouTube documentary, and applied emotion analysis as well as a machine learning approach to the comments. We first cleaned the data and then introduced an emotion analysis based on the statistical characteristics and lexicon combination. After that, we applied the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach to further generate main topics with keywords from the comments and visualized the distribution by visualizing the topics. The result shows trust (22.8%), joy (15.4%), and anticipation (17.6%) are the most prominent emotions dominating the comments. The major three themes, which account for 70% of all comments, are discussing stories about fighting against the virus, medical workers being heroes, and medical workers being respected. Further discussion has been conducted on the changing of different sentiments over time for the ongoing health crisis. This study proves that emotion analysis and LDA topic modeling could be used to generate explanations of users' opinions and feelings about video products, which could support user recommendations in marketing.