The sentiment analisys survey conducted by Crea in collaboration with the University of Turin was presented at the VII edition of the Food Journalism Festival, which surveyed the mood of users on the web with respect to some semantic areas related to agri-food issues through an automatic analysis of the written language that assigns positive, negative or neutral scores to the words contained in sentences or texts, such as tweets, thus obtaining the "feeling".
The research was conducted on a double semantic track: on the one hand, the discourses around themes of food sustainability and war in Ukraine(in the period September 2021 - May 2022), while at the same time the debate around the Nutriscore VS Nutrinform issue was examined: the problem of the traffic light label (detection time June 2021 - May 2022) by analyzing 124 Twitter accounts of general media and specialized in agri-food.
Food sustainability, raw materials, price increases and the war in Ukraine
Out of a total of 5459 tweets, it was noted that since the outbreak of the war, the generalist media tweeted more, trying to provide as much news as possible while the percentages of positive ratings drop. It is interesting to note that the curve of positive judgments is in any case always greater than the negative ones, a phenomenon due to the fact that, both with the war and with the pandemic and with all the consequences of the rise in prices, people do not stop thinking and acting in the direction of sustainability and responsible behavior, both politically, economically and socially. Sustainability is considered the trump card in these difficult times, the indispensable solution for optimizing resources and therefore restarting.
Nutriscore vs Nutrinform
Out of a total of 2749 tweets, the Nutriscore vs Nutrinform debate was more significant in the specialized media, while in the generalist ones it is treated together with other issues relating to labeling in general that did not allow its clear distinction. For both specialized and general media, the positive polarities in the tweets were more frequent than the negative ones. The positive polarities of the specialized ones were always greater than those of the generalists, on the contrary for the negative tweets where the generalist media are more negative. The Nutriscore in most of the tweets is judged badly in Italy especially in the wine, cheese and cured meats sectors that have been "demolished" by the Nutriscore scores, but there are also some acceptability exceptions, while the Italian Nutrinform is always well perceived . Positivity is also addressed as a necessity, a desire to clarify these "traffic light labels" to better safeguard our food heritage.
The importance of Sentiment Analysis
In an increasingly digital world where thousands, if not millions, of opinions are written on the web every day, not only from ordinary people but also from important political and decision-making figures, it is essential to analyze this amount of information, a tool that can prove to be fundamental. to understand the progress of our company.
