The COVID-19 pandemic, since its beginning in December 2019, has altered every aspect of human life. In Vietnam, the pandemic is in its fourth peak and is the most serious so far, putting Vietnam in the list of top 30 countries with the highest daily cases. In this paper, we wish to identify the magnitude of its impact on college students in Vietnam. As far as we’re concerned, college students belong to the most affected groups in the population, especially in big cities that have been hitting hard by the virus. We conducted an online survey from 31 May 2021 to 9 June 2021, asking students from four representative regions in Vietnam to describe how the pandemic has changed their lifestyle and studying environment, as well as their awareness, compliance, and psychological state. The collected answers were processed to eliminate unreliable ones then prepared for sentiment analysis. To analyze the relationship among the variables, we performed a variety of statistical tests, including Shapiro–Wilk, Mc Nemar, Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon, Kruskal–Wallis, and Pearson’s Chi-square tests. Among 1875 students who participated, many did not embrace online education. A total of 64.53% of them refused to think that online education would be the upcoming trend. During the pandemic, nearly one quarter of students were in a negative mood. About the same number showed signs of depression. We also observed that there were increasing patterns in sleeping time, body weight, and sedentary lifestyle. However, they maintained a positive attitude toward health protection and compliance with government regulations (65.81%). As far as we know, this is the first project to conduct such a large-scale survey analysis on students in Vietnam. The findings of the paper help us take notice of financial and mental needs and perspective issues for indigent students, which contributes to reducing the pandemic’s negative effects and going forwards to a better and more sustainable life.

Sentiment classification is a crucial task in sentiment analysis, and has received significant attention from researchers. Previous studies have focused on using several techniques to solve this problem. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of these works has fully investigated the exploitation and the manipulation of contextual information in the text, or taken advantage of the combined power of state-of-theart models. In this paper, we propose an effective ensemble learning model for the sentiment classification problem. In our system, the contextual information in the text is fully captured by integrating rule-based methods and other state-of-the-art deep learning models. We found that the combination of word embedding representation and the attention mechanism, along with pre-defined rules and specific-domain sentiment dictionaries are helpful in dealing with numerous valence-shifting cases. Although the computational cost of the proposed system is higher than those of certain other algorithms, this system obtains better results than other approaches when tested on three different datasets.

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