Using Big Data and Serverless Architecture to Follow the Emotional Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Mexico

Abstract

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented change in the lifestyle routines of millions of people. Beyond the multiple repercussions of the pandemic, we are also facing significant challenges in the population’s mental health and health programs. Typical techniques to measure the population’s mental health are semiautomatic. Social media allow us to know habits and daily life, making this data a rich silo for understanding emotional and mental well-being. This study aims to build a resilient and flexible system that allows us to track and measure the sentiment changes of a given population, in our case, the Mexican people, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We built an extensive data system utilizing modern cloud-based serverless architectures to analyze 760,064,879 public domain tweets collected from a public access repository to examine the collective shifts in the general mood about the pandemic evolution, news cycles, and governmental policies using open sentiment analysis tools. We provide metrics, advantages, and challenges of developing serverless cloud-based architectures for a natural language processing project of a large magnitude.