A Sentiment Analysis Approach to Predict an Individual’s Awareness of the Precautionary Procedures to Prevent COVID-19 Outbreaks in Saudi Arabia
Sumayh S. Aljameel, Dina A. Alabbad, Norah A. Alzahrani, Shouq M. Alqarni, Fatimah A. Alamoudi, Lana M. Babili, Somiah K. Aljaafary, Fatima M. Alshamrani
Abstract
In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a pandemic, which affected all countries worldwide. During the outbreak, public sentiment analyses contributed valuable information toward making appropriate public health responses. This study aims to develop a model that predicts an individual's awareness of the precautionary procedures in five main regions in Saudi Arabia. In this study, a dataset of Arabic COVID-19 related tweets was collected, which fell in the period of the curfew. The dataset was processed, based on several machine learning predictive models: Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), and Naïve Bayes (NB), along with the N-gram feature extraction technique. The results show that applying the SVM classifier along with bigram in Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) outperformed other models with an accuracy of 85%. The results of awareness prediction showed that the south region observed the highest level of awareness towards COVID-19 containment measures, whereas the middle region was the least. The proposed model can support the medical sectors and decision-makers to decide the appropriate procedures for each region based on their attitudes towards the pandemic.