Sentiment analysis of tweets related to SUS before and during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the whole world since the beginning of 2020. In Brazil, over 70% of the population rely on the Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS). Knowing public opinion related to SUS is very important for the improvement of services and assistance provided by such an entity. Sentiment analysis has been used in several applications including social networks and blogs to extract public opinion. Despite the fact that other papers have already worked with sentiment analysis, none of them have focused on SUS. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to analyse the sentiments shown by Brazillian Twitter users about SUS before and during COVID-19 pandemic. To reach this goal, a database of portuguese tweets regarding SUS posted between december 2019 and october 2020 was created. The tweets were pre-processed, classified and then analysed. The results show that, in most cases, users are in favor of SUS.