Title: Sentiment analysis on pandemic poems using TextBlob

Authors: Subhasri Vijayakumar; V. Maheysh

Addresses: Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Chennai, India ' Vellore Institute of Technology, Vandalur-Kelambakkam Road, Chennai 600127, India

Abstract: Pandemic poetries are those poems written to document the pandemic poetically, created with an aim to connect people and help each other in the times of isolation. Interpreting poems largely reside with the readers and there is always the underlying communication of the author too. A highly subjective area for interpretation and understanding, marked with contextual meanings, poems offer diverse thought processes. Analysing the sentiments of the written work cannot always be white and black; there are grey areas to be explored also. How convergent or divergent will be the results of interpretation when analysed through machine sentiments? Through this study we aim to analyse two poems published during this pandemic situation using Textblob. It can be deduced that sentiment is influenced only by the literal meaning of words, rather than by the context of the whole sentence/paragraph which brings in divergence in interpretation especially in the word-list-based method.

Keywords: sentiment analysis; poems; pandemic literature; TextBlob; machine interpretations; social media; Python; opinion mining.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIE.2023.131936

International Journal of Intelligent Enterprise, 2023 Vol.10 No.3, pp.280 - 289

Received: 12 Nov 2020
Accepted: 27 Aug 2021
Published online: 05 Jul 2023 *

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