Content and Sentiment Analysis of The New York Times Coronavirus (2019-nCOV) Articles with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Leximancer

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to prove the use of content and sentiment analysis to understand public discourse on Nytimes.com around the coronavirus (2019-nCOV) pandemic. We examined the pandemic discourses in the article contents, news, expert opinions, and statements of official institutions with natural language processing methods. We analyzed how the mainstream media (Nytimes.com) sets the community agenda. As a method, the textual data for the research were collected with the Orange3 software text-mining tool via the Nytimes.com API, and content analysis was conducted with Leximancer software. The research data were divided into three categories (first, mid, and last) based on the date ranges determined during the pandemic. Using Leximancer concept maps tools, we explained concepts and their relationships by visualizing them to show pandemic discourse. We used VADER sentiment analysis to analyze the pandemic discourse. The results gave us the distance and proximity positions of themes related to Nytimes.com pandemic discourse, revealed according to their conceptual definitions. Additionally, we compared the performance of six machine learning algorithms on the task of text classification. Considering the findings, it is possible to conclude that in Nytimes.com (2019-nCOV) discourse, some concepts have changed on a regular basis while others have remained constant. The pandemic discourse focused on specific concepts that were seen to guide human behavior and presented content that may cause anxiety to readers of Nytimes.com. The results of the sentiment analysis supported these findings. Another result was that the findings showed us that the contents of the coronavirus (2019-nCOV) articles supported official policies. It can be concluded that regarding the coronavirus (2019-nCOV), which has caused profound societal changes and has results such as death, restrictions, and mask use, the discourse did not go beyond a total of 15 main themes and about 100 concepts. The content analysis of Nytimes.com reveals that it has behavioral effects, such as causing fear and anxiety in people. Considering the media dependency of society, this result is important. It can be said that the agenda-setting of society does not go beyond the traditional discourse due to the tendency of individuals to use newspapers and news websites to obtain information.