ABSTRACT
Understanding the relationship between online media and vaccine-related information is essential for public inoculation strategies. Despite the advent of automated methods for this purpose, there is a gap in terms of applying Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP) to understand information regarding COVID-19 vaccines in Romanian online news. In this sense, this pilot study aims to close the gap by using NLP techniques to analyze information related to vaccines in online news articles. A corpus of 5,670 vaccine-related online news articles published between January and December 2021 was analyzed using sentiment and word cloud analyses to understand the valence and content of COVID-19 vaccine -related information. The results indicate the utility of the proposed method for public and private actors, as well as further required efforts for using NLP techniques to understand and monitor information regarding vaccines present in Romanian online news articles.