Analyzing User Digital Emotions from a Holy versus Non-Pilgrimage City in Saudi Arabia on Twitter Platform

Humans are the product of what society and their environment conditions them into being. People living in metropolitan cities have a very fast-paced life and are constantly exposed to different situations. A social media platform enables individuals to express their emotions and sentiments and thus acts as a reservoir for the digital emotion footprints of its users. This study proposes that the user data available on Twitter has the potential to showcase the contrasting emotions of people residing in a pilgrimage city versus those residing in other, non-pilgrimage areas. We collected the Arabic geolocated tweets of users living in Mecca (holy city) and Riyadh (non-pilgrimage city). The user emotions were classified on the basis of Plutchik’s eight basic emotion categories, Fear, Anger, Sadness, Joy, Surprise, Disgust, Trust, and Anticipation. A new bilingual dictionary, AEELex (Arabic English Emotion Lexicon), was designed to determine emotions derived from user tweets. AEELex has been validated on commonly known and popular lexicons. An emotion analysis revealed that people living in Mecca had more positivity than those residing in Riyadh. Anticipation was the emotion that was dominant or most expressed in both places. However, a larger proportion of users living in Mecca fell under this category. The proposed analysis was an initial attempt toward studying the emotional and behavioral differences between users living in different cities of Saudi Arabia. This study has several other important applications. First, the emotion-based study could contribute to the development of a machine learning-based model for predicting depression in netizens. Second, behavioral appearances mined from the text could benefit efforts to identify the regional location of a particular user.