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Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Users Over Time: The Case of the Boston Bombing Tragedy

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E-Life: Web-Enabled Convergence of Commerce, Work, and Social Life (WEB 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 258))

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Abstract

Social Network Services (SNS), for example Twitter, play a significant role in the way people share their emotions about specific events. Emotions can spread via SNS and can spur people’s future actions. Therefore, during extreme events, disaster response agencies need to manage emotions appropriately via SNS. In this research, we investigate the Twitter verse associated with an event - the Boston Bombing context. We focus on tweets in the context of hazard-describing keywords (Explosion, Bomb), important event timelines, and the related changes in emotions over time. We compare the results with a corpus of tweets collected at the same time that are not associated with the above hazard- describing keywords. A sentiment analysis shows anger was the most strongly expressed emotion in both groups. However, there were statistical differences in Anxiety and Sadness among the two groups over time.

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Acknowledgements

This research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants 1353119 and 1353195. This research has also been funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grants 1241709, 1227353, 1419856 and 1554373. The usual disclaimer applies. We would like to thank Chulwhan Chris Bang for his data collection help and Chandrakanth Saravanan, Megan Saldanha and Swati Upadhya for research support.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Information Systems, College of Business, Louisiana Tech University, P.O. Box 10318, Ruston, LA, 71272 , USA

    Jaeung Lee

  2. Department of Management Science and Systems, School of Management, State University of New York at Buffalo, 325 Jacobs Management Center, Buffalo, NY, 14260, USA

    Basma Abdul Rehman

  3. Department of Information Systems Decision Sciences, Muma College of Business, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, BSN 3403, Tampa, FL, 33620, USA

    Manish Agrawal

  4. Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, College of Business, The University of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX, 78249, USA

    H. Raghav Rao

Authors
  1. Jaeung Lee
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  2. Basma Abdul Rehman
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  3. Manish Agrawal
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  4. H. Raghav Rao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jaeung Lee .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Decision and Information Sciences, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Vijayan Sugumaran

  2. Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, USA

    Victoria Yoon

  3. Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Michael J. Shaw

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Emotion changes for days 1, 3, 4 and 5

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Lee, J., Rehman, B.A., Agrawal, M., Rao, H.R. (2016). Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Users Over Time: The Case of the Boston Bombing Tragedy. In: Sugumaran, V., Yoon, V., Shaw, M. (eds) E-Life: Web-Enabled Convergence of Commerce, Work, and Social Life. WEB 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 258. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45408-5_1

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