Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

1-1-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S. in Engineering Science

First Advisor

Dawn E. Wilkins

Second Advisor

Dawn E. Wilkins

Third Advisor

Yixin Chen

Relational Format

dissertation/thesis

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected peoples’ daily lives all over theworld - physically, economically, and emotionally. Due to the virus, many people have died, and many hospitalized. A record number of people have lost their job, and many businesses have closed. The global economy is at risk. People are facing new realities of their lives. Studies have shown that the level of depression is three times higher than before this pandemic. Previous studies have shown that people use social media to express their emotions and feelings. The purpose of this study is to understand the depression during this COVID-19 pandemic using social media data. To study the depression-related tweets, I have used a COVID-19 related dataset that is made available by IEEE. Regarding methods,I have employed unsupervised techniques such as clustering and topic modeling. Besides, I have used sentiment analysis to understand the emotions and subjectivity in the clusters.The result from the analysis shows the change of depression related discussions during this pandemic over a five and a half months period of time. It also shows the characteristics of the overall discussion around depression. The findings may be useful for future depression studies.

Concentration/Emphasis

Computer Science

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