Covid Global confinement Emotion aNalysis (COVGEN)

COVGEN is a COVID-19 project based on AI models to explore and understand the emotions of millions of people under social confinement around the world, as expressed in their tweets.

The project is led by Rita Orji, (Persuasive Computing Lab) and Stan Matwin (Institute for Big Data Analytics), both from the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, working with research assistants Hamed Jelodar and Oladapo Oyebode. The team also includes Swarna Weerasinghe, from Dalhousie’s Department of Community Health and Epidemiology. A unique feature of our project is our partnership with Twitter that gives us access to a global, complete stream of historical tweets including COVID-related tweets since the pandemic started

This project demonstrates the effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence, and in particular Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning in detecting and analyzing emotions from tweets talking about #covid19 social confinement. We also examine how emotions of people under social confinement change as their isolation progresses in time, taking into consideration geo-temporal variations of public policy decisions.