Sentiment Analysis in Crisis Situations for Better Connected Government

Abstract

One of the pillars of connected government is citizen centricity: an approach in which citizen participation is essential. In Mexico, social networks are currently one of the most important means by which citizens express their needs and provide opinions to the government. The goal of this chapter is to contribute to citizen centricity by adapting the methodology of sentiment analysis of social media posts to an expanded version for crisis situations. The main difference in this approach from the normally accepted one is that instead of using pre-defined classes (positive and negative) for sentiments, the authors first determined the different data categories and then applied them to the classic process of sentiment analysis. This approach was tested using posts on Mexico's earthquake in 2017. They found that needs, demands, and claims made in the posts reflect sentiments in a better way, and this can help to improve the government-citizen connection.