ABSTRACT
For a healthy society to exist, it is crucial for the media to focus on disease-related issues so that more people are widely aware of them and reduce health risks. Recently, deep neural networks have become a popular tool for textual sentiment analysis, which can provide valuable insights and real-time monitoring and analysis regarding health issues. In this paper, as part of an effort to develop an effective model that can elicit public sentiment on COVID-19 news, we propose a novel approach Cov-Att-BiLSTM for sentiment analysis of COVID-19 news headlines using deep neural networks. We integrate attention mechanisms, embedding techniques, and semantic level data labeling into the prediction process to enhance the accuracy. To evaluate the proposed approach, we compared it to several deep and machine learning classifiers using various metrics of categorization efficiency and prediction quality, and the experimental results demonstrate its superiority with 0.931 testing accuracy. Furthermore, 73,138 pandemic-related tweets posted on six global channels were analyzed by the proposed approach, which accurately reflects global coverage of COVID-19 news and vaccination.
ABSTRACT
For a healthy society to exist, it is crucial for the media to focus on disease-related issues so that more people are widely aware of them and reduce health risks. Recently, deep neural networks have become a popular tool for textual sentiment analysis, which can provide valuable insights and real-time monitoring and analysis regarding health issues. In this paper, as part of an effort to develop an effective model that can elicit public sentiment on COVID-19 news, we propose a novel approach Cov-Att-BiLSTM for sentiment analysis of COVID-19 news headlines using deep neural networks. We integrate attention mechanisms, embedding techniques, and semantic level data labeling into the prediction process to enhance the accuracy. To evaluate the proposed approach, we compared it to several deep and machine learning classifiers using various metrics of categorization efficiency and prediction quality, and the experimental results demonstrate its superiority with 0.931 testing accuracy. Furthermore, 73,138 pandemic-related tweets posted on six global channels were analyzed by the proposed approach, which accurately reflects global coverage of COVID-19 news and vaccination.
ABSTRACT
Persuasion exists in every aspect of social life. It is important to understand how persuasion works and how strong it is. In this article, we improve the classic Hegselmann-Krause model, one of the most famous bounded confidence models, and propose a novel opinion dynamics model to explain the process by which persuasion occurs from a systematic perspective. In our model, the concepts of latitudes of acceptance, noncommitment, and rejection from social judgment theory and the cognitive error in the process of persuasion, namely assimilation, are introduced. When people are exchanging their opinions with their neighbors, the opinions in the latitude of acceptance will be assimilated, those in the latitude of noncommitment will keep unchanged, and those in the latitude of rejection will not be considered. Theoretical proofs show that our model will converge to a stable state in a finite time. Numerical results of extensive simulation experiments on four datasets show the performance of the model. Furthermore, real social platform data and global COVID-19 vaccination data are analyzed to verify the effectiveness of the model in the decision-making process.
ABSTRACT
When COVID-19 was raging around the world, people were more fearful and anxious. In this context, the media should uphold impartiality and shoulder the responsibility of eliminating misinformation. Therefore, our research adopted sentiment analysis technologies to analyze the impartiality of news agencies and analyzed the factors that affect the impartiality of COVID-19-related articles about various countries. The SentiWordNet3.0 and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) models were employed to analyze the articles and visualize the data. The following conclusions were redrawn in our research. During the pandemic, articles of some news agencies were not objective; the impartiality of news agencies was related to the reliability of news agencies instead of the bias of news agencies; there were obvious differences in the coverage and positivity of international news agencies to report the performance of COVID-19 prevention and control in different countries.
ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that the COVID-19 epidemic posed the most significant challenge to all governments globally since January 2020. People have to readapt after the epidemic to daily life with the absence of an effective vaccine for a long time. The epidemic has led to society division and uncertainty. With such issues, governments have to take efficient procedures to fight the epidemic. In this paper, we analyze and discuss two official news agencies' tweets of Iran and Turkey by using sentiment- and semantic analysis-based unsupervised learning approaches. The main topics, sentiments, and emotions that accompanied the agencies' tweets are identified and compared. The results are analyzed from the perspective of psychology, sociology, and communication.
ABSTRACT
Healthcare workers (HCWs) are at high risk of occupational exposure to the new pandemic human coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and are a source of nosocomial transmission in airborne infectious isolation rooms (AIIRs). Here, we performed comprehensive environmental contamination surveillance to evaluate the risk of viral transmission in AIIRs with 115 rooms in three buildings at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, Shanghai, during the treatment of 334 patients infected with SARS-CoV-2. The results showed that the risk of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in AIIRs was low (1.62%, 25/1544) due to the directional airflow and strong environmental hygiene procedures. However, we detected viral RNA on the surface of foot-operated openers and bathroom sinks in AIIRs (viral load: 55.00-3154.50 copies/mL). This might be a source of contamination to connecting corridors and object surfaces through the footwear and gloves used by HCWs. The risk of infection was eliminated by the use of disposable footwear covers and the application of more effective environmental and personal hygiene measures. With the help of effective infection control procedures, none of 290 HCWs was infected when working in the AIIRs at this hospital. This study has provided information pertinent for infection control in AIIRs during the treatment of COVID-19 patients.