Sentiment analysis and causal learning of COVID-19 tweets prior to the rollout of vaccines

While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely studied, relatively fewer discussions about the sentimental reaction of the public are available. In this article, we scrape COVID-19 related tweets on the microblogging platform, Twitter, and examine the tweets from February 24, 2020 to October 14, 2020 in four Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary) and four U.S. cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle). Applying the RoBERTa, Vader and NRC approaches, we evaluate sentiment intensity scores and visualize the results over different periods of the pandemic. Sentiment scores for the tweets concerning three anti-epidemic measures, “masks”, “vaccine”, and “lockdown”, are computed for comparison. We explore possible causal relationships among the variables concerning tweet activities and sentiment scores of COVID-19 related tweets by integrating the echo state network method with convergent cross-mapping. Our analyses show that public sentiments about COVID-19 vary from time to time and from place to place, and are different with respect to anti-epidemic measures of “masks”, “vaccines”, and “lockdown”. Evidence of the causal relationship is revealed for the examined variables, assuming the suggested model is feasible.