Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data on Quantum Computing: An Exploratory Silver‐Label Baseline Study
Faisal Mehmood, Abeer Abdulaziz Alsanad, Muhammad Azeem Akbar, Víctor Leiva, Cecília Castro · IET Software · 2025
Quantum software engineering is advancing rapidly in parallel with equally ambitious hardware roadmaps. However, systematic evidence on how online audiences perceive these advances remains scarce. We present an exploratory baseline of Twitter sentiment toward quantum computing, using automated (silver‐standard) labels for benchmarking. Six months of English‐language tweets containing the hashtag #Quantum (December 1, 2022 and May 31, 2023) were processed, with #Quantum treated as a proxy for online discourse on quantum computing. We then applied a transparent natural language processing (NLP) methodology combining two zero‐shot lexicon‐based tools (TextBlob and the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner [VADER]) with three lightweight supervised classifiers (multinomial naïve Bayes, Rocchio, and perceptron). Following standard preprocessing and a stratified 70/30 train–test split, we do not aim to measure definitive public opinion; rather, our primary contribution is to establish a transparent and reproducible baseline for future benchmarking. In this context, the multinomial naïve Bayes classifier attained a macro F1‐score of 0.88 on the 30% hold‐out set when benchmarked against the TextBlob silver labels. This score captures internal agreement rather than accuracy against human annotation. All five methods converged on a largely—though not universally—positive sentiment orientation (≈78%–81% of nonneutral tweets, depending on the tool). Grounded in the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), we interpret our results as indicating the constructs of curiosity and perceived usefulness, rather than unequivocal adoption readiness. These constructs were not operationalized and serve only as interpretative lenses. By documenting every preprocessing step and model configuration, and making tweet identifiers and code available upon request, the study delivers a reproducible benchmark against which future work can (i) extend the query vocabulary, (ii) incorporate neutral and fine‐grained emotions, (iii) apply cross‐validation protocols, and (iv) evaluate advanced transformer models on manually annotated data. Addressing these four points is essential before making any definitive claims about public opinion.