Abstract
The recent COVID-19 (novel coronavirus disease) pandemic induced a deep polarization among regional as well as global communities. The sentiments regarding the pandemic and its impact on lifestyle and economy, often expressed via social networks, are regarded as critical metrics for capturing such polarization and formulating appropriate intervention by the relevant authorities. While there exist a myriad of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models for mining social media data, we demonstrate the shortcomings of the individual models in this paper, and explore how to improve the COVID-19 sentiment analysis in social media network data via two hybrid predictive models based on a Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM)-based autoencoder and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model coupled with a bi-directional LSTM. Through extensive experiments on the recently acquired Twitter dataset, we compare the COVID-19 sentiments exhibited in the USA and Canada using our proposed hybrid predictive models and demonstrate their superiority over individual Artificial Intelligence (AI) models.