L'impatto emotivo della comunicazione istituzionale durante la pandemia di COVID-19: uno studio di Twitter Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Gloria Gagliardi, Lorenzo Gregori, Alice Suozzi (Università di Napoli L'Orientale, Università di Firenze, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2020)
Topic: Sentiment, Emotion, Irony, Hate

Abstract
The article aims to investigate the impact of institutional communications during the health crisis caused by the Covid-19 in Italy, through computational analysis of micro-blogging activity on Twitter. Starting from the corpus TWITA, we have created a Sentiment Analysis to observe any changes in the polarity of user writings, in response to eleven institutional speeches held during the health emergency. Variations were observed in response to three speeches by the President of the Council on 4 March, 9 March and 26 April 2020 respectively.

Introduction
The Covid-19 epidemic quickly spread from Wuhan, China, to numerous nations around the world and on March 28, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the state of the Covid-19 pandemic. In Italy, the first case was reported on 21 February 2020; the contagions then spread to different regions and on 8 March 2020 the entire nation was declared a red zone. A national lockdown was also established, which lasted about two months, until 4 May 2020. The emergency situation has been dramatic and completely new: institutional communications, aimed at illustrating containment measures and directing the behaviour of the population, have therefore played a decisive role. Their diffusion took place both through public television and through social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; as a result, these have become the main channels of dissemination of information and sharing opinions. The Sentiment Analysis is a multidisciplinary field of study aimed at investigating and evaluating the opinions expressed in the AUTHOR texts that is the orientation (positive or negative) that the speaker expresses towards an AUTHOR object through lexical devices. Twitter is a privileged source of data for the analysis of emotions and opinions, so much so that today we talk about Twitter Sentiment Analysis (TSA) to identify the specific branch of research based on data extracted from this social network. Today, TSA is used in various areas and for various purposes, such as monitoring users' views on AUTHOR commercial products, studying AUTHOR policy guidelines, analysing levels and causes of stress among AUTHOR adolescents or public opinion about AUTHOR vaccines. This study uses TSA to investigate the impact of institutional communications during the health crisis of Covid-19 in Italy. Specifically, the sentiment of Italian tweets on coronavirus was analysed to identify correlations between the polarity of user opinions (positive or negative) and the speeches given by the President of the Council and the President of the Republic during the pandemic.

Conclusion
To conclude, this study aims to investigate the reactions of Italian citizens to institutional communications during the Covid-19 epidemic. Thanks to the increasing use of social networks, it is in fact possible to explore the psychological reactions to traumatic events, both individual and collective: according to our data, institutional communications that have provoked stronger psychological-emotional reactions are those pronounced on March 4 and 9 and April 26, 2020, which announced the most drastic measures of containment of the epidemic. Further studies could expand this work, considering different national contexts (both where virus containment measures similar to Italian ones have been implemented, and where very different measures have been implemented). In addition, they could be objects of analysis different socio-political events, as suggested by the study Emoitaly (e.g. General elections, International Workers' Day, murder of George Floyd).