Emotional analysis of safeness and risk perception of London and Rome airports during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The evaluation of perceived safeness and risk by individuals is really useful for security and safety managing. Every individual is founded on the opinion of other individuals to get a selection and the Internet personifies the location where these judgments are mainly sought, obtained, and evaluated. From this point of view, social networks are characterized by a significant effect. Due to this reason, Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis have found remarkable uses in various environments and one of the most interesting is embodied by public security and safety. The aim of this work is to study the perception of risk of aircraft passengers and users of airports of London (UK) and Rome (Italy) during COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the airports of London Heathrow and Gatwick and the airports of Rome Fiumicino and Ciampino were studied, from March 23 to July 9, 2020, highlighting the emotional components in three distinct pandemic phases of the considered period in the two countries, by means of the semantic analysis of the textual contents existing in Twitter.