Visualization of Twitter Sentiment during the Period of US Banned Huawei

Abstract

The polarity analysis of sentiments based on users’ expressions on several events has been in much interest for the research. Recently, social media has been popular and it is widely used as a proxy platform to gauge public opinions in real-time. With the growth of microblog sites on the Web, people have started using blog sites like Twitter and other similar social services to express their opinions and emotions on a wide variety of topics. We proposed a visual sentiment analysis framework for US-China trade war related with US banned on Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies. The proposed framework consists of two components, sentiment analysis modeling and geographic visualization. We focus on using Twitter, the most popular microblogging platform, for the task of sentiment analysis by applying lexicon-based approach. This geographic visualization system can help people for better understanding the changes of public sentiment reactions along with the duration and mostly interested regions of Twitter users on this case. In our research, we worked with English language; however, the proposed technique can also be used with any other language.