More than three years have passed since the COVID-19 outbreak. The end of the pandemic is in sight, and even some countries have declared COVID-19 as endemic. During the pandemic, COVID-19 vaccination is essential to controlling the situation in many countries. Monitoring opinions on social media is important to understand the public reception of the COVID-19 vaccine. In this study, we combine LDA with agglomerative clustering to investigate the reactions of people from various countries during different periods for approximately one year after a few countries officially approved vaccination. Agglomerative clustering is performed on the latent topics based on the Hellinger distance for measuring the distance between the distributions of the latent topic. As a result, the proposed methods can show relative closeness among the topics and visualize the topic changes over time. The analysis shows that the significant focuses of tweets in the four phases with an interval of three months are the effectiveness of the vaccine, vaccine booster, Delta variant, and vaccine for children, which coincide with the timeline of the critical COVID events announced by WHO.
BACKGROUND The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic on January 30, 2020. However, the pandemic has not been over yet. Furthermore, in the first quartal of 2021, some countries face the third wave of the pandemic. During the difficult time, the development of the vaccines for COVID-19 accelerates rapidly. Understanding the public perception of the COVID-19 Vaccine according to the data collected from social media can widen the perspective on the state of the global pandemic OBJECTIVE This study explores and analyzes the latent topic on COVID-19 Vaccine Tweet posted by individuals from various countries by using two-stage topic modeling. METHODS A two-stage analysis in topic modeling was proposed to investigating people’s reactions in five countries. The first stage is Latent Dirichlet Allocation that produces the latent topics with the corresponding term distributions that facilitate the investigators to understand the main issues or opinions. The second stage then performs agglomerative clustering on the latent topics based on Hellinger distance, which merges close topics hierarchically into topic clusters to visualize those topics in either tree or graph views. RESULTS In general, the topic discussion regarding the COVID-19 Vaccine in five countries is similar. Topic themes such as "first vaccine" and & "vaccine effect" dominate the public discussion. The remarkable point is that people in some countries have some topic themes, such as "politician opinion" and " stay home" in Canada, "emergency" in India, and & "blood clots" in the United Kingdom. The analysis also shows the most popular COVID-19 Vaccine, which is gaining more public interest. CONCLUSIONS With LDA and Hierarchical clustering, two-stage topic modeling is powerful for visualizing the latent topics and understanding the public perception regarding the COVID-19 Vaccine.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.