Sentiment Analysis of Users’ Reviews on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps with a Benchmark Dataset (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Contact tracing has been globally adopted in the fight to control the infection rate of COVID-19. Thanks to digital technologies, such as smartphones and wearable devices, contacts of COVID-19 patients can be easily traced and informed about their potential exposure to the virus. To this aim, several interesting mobile applications have been developed. However, there are ever-growing concerns over the working mechanism and performance of these applications. The literature already provides some interesting exploratory studies on the community’s response to the applications by analyzing information from different sources, such as news and users’ reviews of the applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no existing solution that automatically analyzes users’ reviews and extracts the evoked sentiments. OBJECTIVE In this paper, we analyze how AI models can help in automatically extract and classify the polarity of users’ sentiments and propose a sentiment analysis framework to automatically analyze users’ reviews on COVID-19 contact tracing mobile applications. METHODS we propose a pipeline starting from manual annotation via a crowd-sourcing study and concluding on the development and training of AI models for automatic sentiment analysis of users’ reviews. In detail, we collected and annotated a large-scale dataset of Android and iOS mobile application users’ reviews for COVID-19 contact tracing. After manually analyzing and annotating users’ reviews, we employed both classical (i.e., Naïve Bayes, SVM, Random Forest) and deep learning (i.e., fastText, and different transformers) methods for classification experiments. This resulted in eight different classification models. RESULTS We employed eight different methods on three different tasks achieving up to an average F1-Scores 94.8% indicating the feasibility of automatic sentiment analysis of users’ reviews on the COVID-19 contact tracing applications. Moreover, the crowd-sourcing activity resulted in a large-scale benchmark dataset composed of 34,534 reviews manually annotated from the contract tracing applications of 46 distinct countries. CONCLUSIONS The existing literature mostly relies on the manual/exploratory analysis of users’ reviews on the application, which is a tedious and time-consuming process. Moreover, in the existing studies, generally, data from fewer applications are analyzed. In this work, we showed that automatic sentiment analysis can help in analyzing users’ responses to the application more quickly with significant accuracy. Moreover, we also provided a large-scale benchmark dataset composed of 34,534 reviews from 47 different applications. We believe the presented analysis and the dataset will support future research on the topic.