Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory for Analysis of Public Opinion Sentiment on Government Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

one of the initiatives adopted by the Indonesian government to combat the development of COVID-19 in Indonesia is Community Activities Restrictions Enforcement. Many public opinions emerged, both for and against this policy. There are so many comments every second that it is certainly not easy to analyze them by reading each one by one. This task necessitates computer applications. Therefore, this study was conducted to produce an application that can help analyze public sentiment on the policy through social media, namely Twitter, into three classes: positive, neutral, and negative. The method used in this research is bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), one of the algorithms of deep learning. This study trains the model using the dataset, which consists of 10,486 tweets. The model receives an f1-score of 76.67 %. Thus, the model can be used to analyze public sentiment when the same policy is enforced. It can determine public acceptance of this policy. Thus, the system created in this research can be used as evaluation material for the government to review the policy when it is implemented in the future. However, this study concentrates on how to develop the sentiment analysis system and does not examine how the community responds to government policy.