An OWA Based MCDM Framework for Analyzing Multidimensional Twitter Data: A Case Study on the Citizen-Government Engagement During COVID-19

Abstract

In this global pandemic caused by coronavirus, the role of social media is found to be vital for spreading awareness and faultless news about various aspects of the pandemic. Governments across the world are constantly using available social media platforms to communicate crisis information efficiently to the public, which ultimately making citizens aware about the prevailing conditions. This study systematically investigates how Indian government agencies used social media platform-Twitter to disseminate the relevant information, and to reach out to the citizens during COVID 19 crisis. Spread across various parameters over many days, the twitter data was scrapped from the official Twitter accounts of different government officials. To aggregate and summarize this multi-dimensional data and to process it further, a novel multi-criteria decision making based framework that makes the use of Clustering and Ordered weighted operators is being introduced in this study. Many OWA operators have been introduced in the recent past after their introduction in late 90s, and are used successfully for aggregation purposes in many domains. The summarized values received as an output of the framework are then used to analyze the government response towards COVID 19 situation across various parameters.