Major concerns regarding food services based on news media reports during the COVID-19 outbreak using the topic modeling approach.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases were first reported in December 2019, in China, and an increasing number of cases have since been detected all over the world. The purpose of this study was to collect significant news media reports on food services during the COVID-19 crisis and identify public communication and significant concerns regarding COVID-19 for suggesting future directions for the food industry and services. SUBJECTS/METHODS: News articles pertaining to food services were extracted from the home pages of major news media websites such as BBC, CNN, and Fox News between March 2020 and February 2021. The retrieved data was sorted and analyzed using Python software. RESULTS: The results of text analytics were presented in the format of the topic label and category for individual topics. The food and health category presented the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on food and health, such as an increase in delivery services. The policy category was indicative of a change in government policy. The lifestyle change category addressed topics such as an increase in social media usage. CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to analyze major news media (i.e., BBC, CNN, and Fox News) data related to food services in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Text analytics research on the food services domain revealed different categories such as food and health, policy, and lifestyle change. Therefore, this study contributes to the body of knowledge on food services research, through the use of text analytics to elicit findings from media sources.

Deep Learning-Based Knowledge Graph Generation for COVID-19

Many attempts have been made to construct new domain-specific knowledge graphs using the existing knowledge base of various domains. However, traditional “dictionary-based” or “supervised” knowledge graph building methods rely on predefined human-annotated resources of entities and their relationships. The cost of creating human-annotated resources is high in terms of both time and effort. This means that relying on human-annotated resources will not allow rapid adaptability in describing new knowledge when domain-specific information is added or updated very frequently, such as with the recent coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic situation. Therefore, in this study, we propose an Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) system based on unsupervised learning without a pre-built dataset. The proposed method obtains knowledge from a vast amount of text documents about COVID-19 rather than a general knowledge base and add this to the existing knowledge graph. First, we constructed a COVID-19 entity dictionary, and then we scraped a large text dataset related to COVID-19. Next, we constructed a COVID-19 perspective language model by fine-tuning the bidirectional encoder representations from transformer (BERT) pre-trained language model. Finally, we defined a new COVID-19-specific knowledge base by extracting connecting words between COVID-19 entities using the BERT self-attention weight from COVID-19 sentences. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed Co-BERT model outperforms the original BERT in terms of mask prediction accuracy and metric for evaluation of translation with explicit ordering (METEOR) score.