A Comparative NLP-Based Study on the Current Trends and Future Directions in COVID-19 Research

Abstract

COVID-19 is a global health crisis that has altered human life and still promises to create ripples of death and destruction in its wake. The sea of scientific literature published over a short time-span to understand and mitigate this global phenomenon necessitates concerted efforts to organize our findings and focus on the unexplored facets of the disease. In this work, we applied natural language processing (NLP) based approaches on scientific literature published on COVID-19 to infer significant keywords that have contributed to our social, economic, demographic, psychological, epidemiological, clinical, and medical understanding of this pandemic. We identify key terms appearing in COVID literature that vary in representation when compared to other virus-borne diseases such as MERS, Ebola, and Influenza. We also identify countries, topics, and research articles that demonstrate that the scientific community is still reacting to the short-term threats such as transmissibility, health risks, treatment plans, and public policies, underpinning the need for collective international efforts towards long-term immunization and drug-related challenges. Furthermore, our study highlights several long-term research directions that are urgently needed for COVID-19 such as: global collaboration to create international open-access data repositories, policymaking to curb future outbreaks, psychological repercussions of COVID-19, vaccine development for SARS-CoV-2 variants and their long-term efficacy studies, and mental health issues in both children and elderly.

A Dual-Stage Vocabulary of Features (VoF)-Based Technique for COVID-19 Variants’ Classification

“…Accuracy is very important performance parameter. Similarly, specificity can be calculated by Equation (2). Specificity is the ratio of the prediction of normal images present in the database.…”

“…Variants of concern can cause an increase in transmission. These variants are alpha (α), beta (β), gamma (γ) [2], and delta (δ) [3]. On the other hand, variants of concern such as lambda (λ) and mu (µ) can cause community transmission or multiple clusters.…”

Effect of neuro-linguistic programming on COVID-19 fear in kidney transplant patients: A randomized controlled study

“…With NLP techniques, patients are prepared both physically and mentally. Since every behavior has a structure, it has been emphasized that if change can be created in mental programs, change can be achieved in feelings, thoughts, and attitudes toward COVID-19 [ [37] , [38] , [39] , [40] ]. It is thought that this change may be the reason for the decrease in the COVID-19 fear scores in the NLP group.…”

“…Finally, the constant emphasis on the assumptions of “A person has all the resources he needs” and “every behavior has a positive intention at its core” can have an impact on the effectiveness of NLP. According to NLP, “mind and body form a magnificent system working together” [ [38] , [39] , [40] ]. In this study, both mental and physical preparation suggestions were given to cope with the fear of COVID-19, and the implementation of the relevant practices may have been effective in reducing the fear.…”

Towards a Unified Pandemic Management Architecture: Survey, Challenges and Future Directions

“…COVID-19 is expected to acquire an endemic status over time, causing intermittent outbreaks. Hence, it is imperative to design policies around the clinical management strategies, rehabilitation measures, human behavior and pandemic response [4][5][6][7].…”