IDENTIFICATION OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT OVER COMMENTS THROUGH TWEETS BY DIGITAL INDIA

Abstract

The Digital India initiative by the Government of India is an initiative by Shri Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India. Launched in the year 2015, the programme enhanced its scope to various digital services wings. In this study, the researcher attempted to identify public sentiments by studying their comments through Tweets. The researcher considered the Tweets by Digital India for a period of one year from November 21, 2016 to November 20, 2017. With the help of Quasi Systematic Sampling, 572 Tweets were pulled up for analysis. The researcher studied the first two comments of each Tweet. Every comment was categorized based on primary sentiment of the sentence such as ‘Support’, ‘Criticism’, ‘Neutral’, ‘Enquiry’ and ‘Out of Context’. In order to validate the researcher’s conclusion of the sentiment on any comment, the researcher conducted ‘Inter-Rater Reliability Test’ to calculate Kappa Coefficient (k). This study intends to find out the sentiment of the public in majority and the Twitter accounts, which received the higher percentage of supportive, neutral or criticizing comments. The research further tries to identify if the supportive or criticizing comments are higher in English or Hindi.