Mining netizen’s opinion on cryptocurrency: sentiment analysis of Twitter data

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to explore netizen’s opinions on cryptocurrency under the lens of emotion theory and lexicon sentiments analysis via machine learning. Design/methodology/approach An automated Web-scrapping via RStudio is performed to collect the data of 15,000 tweets on cryptocurrency. Sentiment lexicon analysis is done via machine learning to evaluate the emotion score of the sample. The types of emotion tested are anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, trust and the two primary sentiments, i.e. negative and positive. Findings The supervised machine learning discovers a total score of 53,077 sentiments from the sampled 15,000 tweets. This score is from the artificial intelligence evaluation of eight emotions, i.e. anger (2%), anticipation (18%), disgust (1%), fear (3%), joy (15%), sadness (3%), surprise (7%), trust (15%) and the two sentiments, i.e. negative (4%) and positive (33%). The result indicates that the sample primarily contains positive sentiments. This finding is theoretically significant to measure the emotion theory on the sampled tweets that can best explain the social implications of the cryptocurrency phenomenon. Research limitations/implications This work is limited to evaluate the sampled tweets’ sentiment scores to explain the social implication of cryptocurrency. Practical implications The finding is necessary to explain the recent phenomenon of cryptocurrency. The positive sentiment may describe the increase in investment in the decentralised finance market. Meanwhile, the anticipation emotion may illustrate the public’s reaction to the bubble prices of cryptocurrencies. Social implications Previous studies find that the social signals, e.g. word-of-mouth, netizens’ opinions, among others, affect the cryptocurrencies’ movement prices. This paper helps explain the social implications of such dynamic of pricing via sentiment analysis. Originality/value This study contributes to theoretically explain the implications of the cryptocurrency phenomenon under the emotion theory. Specifically, this study shows how supervised machine learning can measure the emotion theory from data tweets to explain the implications of cryptocurrencies.