Text Mining and Emotion Classification on Monkeypox Twitter Dataset: A Deep Learning-Natural Language Processing (NLP) Approach

Emotion classification has become a valuable tool in analyzing text and emotions people express in response to events or crises, particularly on social media and other online platforms. The recent news about monkeypox highlighted various emotions individuals felt during the outbreak. People’s opinions and concerns have been very different based on their awareness and understanding of the disease. Although there have been studies on monkeypox, emotion classification related to this virus has not been considered. As a result, this study aims to analyze the emotions individual expressed on social media posts related to the monkeypox disease. Our goal is to provide real-time information and identify critical concerns about the disease. To conduct our analysis, first, we extract and preprocess 800,000 datasets and then use NRCLexicon, a Python library, to predict and measure the emotional significance of each text. Secondly, we develop deep learning models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), and the combination of Convolutional Neural Networks and Long Short-Term Memory (CLSTM) for emotion classification. We use SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) and Random Undersampling techniques to address the class imbalance in our training dataset. The results of our study revealed that the CNN model achieved the highest performance with an accuracy of 96%. Overall, emotion classification on the monkeypox dataset can be a powerful tool for improving our understanding of the disease. The findings of this study will help develop effective interventions and improve public health. Author

A Deep Learning Approach for Sentiment Classification of COVID-19 Vaccination Tweets

Now-a-days, social media platforms enable people to continuously express their opinions and thoughts about different topics. Monitoring and analyzing the sentiments of people is essential for governments and business organizations to better understand people's feelings and thoughts. The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been one of the most trending topics on social media over the last two years. Consequently, one of the preventative measures to control and prevent the spread of the virus was vaccination. A dataset was formed by collecting tweets from Twitter for over a month from November 13th to December 31st, 2021. After data cleaning, the tweets were assigned a positive, negative, or neutral label using a natural language processing (NLP) sentiment analysis tool. This study aims to analyze people's public opinion towards the vaccination process against COVID-19. To fulfil this goal, an ensemble model based on deep learning (LSTM-2BiGRU) is proposed that combines long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU). The performance of the proposed model is compared to five traditional machine learning models, two deep learning models in addition to state-of-the-art models. By comparing the results of the models used in this study, the results reveal that the proposed model outperforms all the machine and deep learning models employed in this work with a 92.46% accuracy score. This study also shows that the number of tweets that involve neutral, positive, and negative sentiments is 517496 (37%) tweets, 484258 (34%) tweets, and 409570 (29%) tweets, respectively. The findings indicate that the number of people carrying neutral sentiments towards COVID-19 immunization through vaccines is the highest among others. © 2023, International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications. All Rights Reserved.

Tweets and PCR Test-based Analysis and Prediction of Social Response to a Future Pandemic. A Case Study

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected our society badly. It has been a subject of discussion since 2019 due to the increased prevalence of social media and its extensive use, and it has been a source of tension, fear, and disappointment for people all over the world. In this research, we took data from COVID-19 tweets from 10 different regions from July 25, 2020, to August 29, 2020. Using the well-known word embedding technique count-vectorizer, we experimented with different machine learning classifiers on data to train deep neural networks to improve the accuracy of predicted opinions with a low elapsed time. In addition, we collected PCR results from these regions for the same time interval. We compared the opinions in the form of positive or negative responses with the results of the PCR tests per million people. With the help of the results, We figured out a real-time international measure to detect these regions' behaviors for any future pandemic. If we know how a region thinks about an upcoming pandemic, then we can predict the region's real-time behavior for the particular pandemic. This would happen if we had past case studies to compare, like in our proposed research. Copyrights © 2023 The Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers.

Dynamics of social media behavior before and after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Introduction: Online social media have been both a field of research and a source of data for research since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we aimed to determine how and whether the content of tweets by Twitter users reporting SARS-CoV-2 infections changed over time. Methods: We built a regular expression to detect users reporting being infected, and we applied several Natural Language Processing methods to assess the emotions, topics, and self-reports of symptoms present in the timelines of the users. Results: Twelve thousand one hundred and twenty-one twitter users matched the regular expression and were considered in the study. We found that the proportions of health-related, symptom-containing, and emotionally non-neutral tweets increased after users had reported their SARS-CoV-2 infection on Twitter. Our results also show that the number of weeks accounting for the increased proportion of symptoms was consistent with the duration of the symptoms in clinically confirmed COVID-19 cases. Furthermore, we observed a high temporal correlation between self-reports of SARS-CoV-2 infection and officially reported cases of the disease in the largest English-speaking countries. Discussion: This study confirms that automated methods can be used to find digital users publicly sharing information about their health status on social media, and that the associated data analysis may supplement clinical assessments made in the early phases of the spread of emerging diseases. Such automated methods may prove particularly useful for newly emerging health conditions that are not rapidly captured in the traditional health systems, such as the long term sequalae of SARS-CoV-2 infections.

Into the Unknown: Uncertainty, Foreboding and Financial Markets

While the link between financial market movement and economic policy uncertainty indices is well-established in literature, uncertainty in the form of ‘foreboding' emanating from catastrophic events has not been explored in literature. This paper explores "foreboding”, which reflects uncertainty at its extreme, following the Covid-19 pandemic. Using Natural Language Processing on minute-by-minute news data, I construct two Foreboding Indices, representing ‘foreboding' or ‘fearful apprehension', for 28,622 Covid-related news for the period July 2020–August 2021. The impact of foreboding on financial market volatility is explored using a logistic regression model. Both the indices show a marked increase in June–July, 2020, in January 2021, April, 2021, and July–August, 2021 and have a positive impact on volatility for hourly S&P 500 Index. Understanding of foreboding sentiment is crucial for central banks looking to monitor financial market volatility. Appropriate signaling in accordance to sentiment can help central banks handle detrimental impacts of market volatility. Moreover, FI can be used for market practitioners to gauge the sentiment and take effective trading decisions. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature.

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: Analysing Twitter to Identify Barriers to Vaccination in a Low Uptake Region of the UK.

To facilitate effective targeted COVID-19 vaccination strategies, it is important to understand reasons for vaccine hesitancy where uptake is low. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques offer an opportunity for real-time analysis of public attitudes, sentiments, and key discussion topics from sources of soft-intelligence, including social media data. In this work, we explore the value of soft-intelligence, leveraged using AI, as an evidence source to support public health research. As a case study, we deployed a natural language processing (NLP) platform to rapidly identify and analyse key barriers to vaccine uptake from a collection of geo-located tweets from London, UK. We developed a search strategy to capture COVID-19 vaccine related tweets, identifying 91,473 tweets between 30 November 2020 and 15 August 2021. The platform's algorithm clustered tweets according to their topic and sentiment, from which we extracted 913 tweets from the top 12 negative sentiment topic clusters. These tweets were extracted for further qualitative analysis. We identified safety concerns; mistrust of government and pharmaceutical companies; and accessibility issues as key barriers limiting vaccine uptake. Our analysis also revealed widespread sharing of vaccine misinformation amongst Twitter users. This study further demonstrates that there is promising utility for using off-the-shelf NLP tools to leverage insights from social media data to support public health research. Future work to examine where this type of work might be integrated as part of a mixed-methods research approach to support local and national decision making is suggested.

Agenda-Setting for COVID-19: A Study of Large-Scale Economic News Coverage Using Natural Language Processing.

Over the past two years, organizations and businesses have been forced to constantly adapt and develop effective responses to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The acuteness, global scale and intense dynamism of the situation make online news and information even more important for making informed management and policy decisions. This paper focuses on the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to examine the news media as the main source of information and agenda-setters of public discourse over an eight-month period. The aim of this study is to understand which economic topics news media focused on alongside the dominant health coverage, which topics did not surface, and how these topics influenced each other and evolved over time and space. To this end, we used an extensive open-source dataset of over 350,000 media articles on non-medical aspects of COVID-19 retrieved from over 60 top-tier business blogs and news sites. We referred to the World Economic Forum's Strategic Intelligence taxonomy to categorize the articles into a variety of topics. In doing so, we found that in the early days of COVID-19, the news media focused predominantly on reporting new cases, which tended to overshadow other topics, such as the economic impact of the virus. Different independent news sources reported on the same topics, showing a herd behavior of the news media during this global health crisis. However, a temporal analysis of news distribution in relation to its geographic focus showed that the rise in COVID-19 cases was associated with an increase in media coverage of relevant socio-economic topics. This research helps prepare for the prevention of social and economic crises when decision-makers closely monitor news coverage of viruses and related topics in other parts of the world. Thus, monitoring the news landscape on a global scale can support decision-making in social and economic crises. Our analyses point to ways in which this monitoring and issues management can be improved to remain alert to social dynamics and market changes.

Crowd Control, Planning, and Prediction Using Sentiment Analysis: An Alert System for City Authorities

Modern means of communication, economic crises, and political decisions play imperative roles in reshaping political and administrative systems throughout the world. Twitter, a micro-blogging website, has gained paramount importance in terms of public opinion-sharing. Manual intelligence of law enforcement agencies (i.e., in changing situations) cannot cope in real time. Thus, to address this problem, we built an alert system for government authorities in the province of Punjab, Pakistan. The alert system gathers real-time data from Twitter in English and Roman Urdu about forthcoming gatherings (protests, demonstrations, assemblies, rallies, sit-ins, marches, etc.). To determine public sentiment regarding upcoming anti-government gatherings (protests, demonstrations, assemblies, rallies, sit-ins, marches, etc.), the alert system determines the polarity of tweets. Using keywords, the system provides information for future gatherings by extracting the entities like date, time, and location from Twitter data obtained in real time. Our system was trained and tested with different machine learning (ML) algorithms, such as random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), multinomial naïve Bayes (MNB), and Gaussian naïve Bayes (GNB), along with two vectorization techniques, i.e., term frequency–inverse document frequency (TFIDF) and count vectorization. Moreover, this paper compares the accuracy results of sentiment analysis (SA) of Twitter data by applying supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms. In our research experiment, we used two data sets, i.e., a small data set of 1000 tweets and a large data set of 4000 tweets. Results showed that RF along with count vectorization performed best for the small data set with an accuracy of 82%;with the large data set, MNB along with count vectorization outperformed all other classifiers with an accuracy of 75%. Additionally, language models, e.g., bigram and trigram, were used to generate the word clouds of positive and negative words to visualize the most frequently used words.

A Review of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for Technology-Assisted Learning: Solving Teaching and Learning Challenges

During the COVID-19 outbreak, all the physical classes suspended, and switched to online learning. The new era of learning presented several challenges for the teachers and students. The students did not have the opportunity to participate in the classroom activities successfully as a physical class due to a lack of educational creativity, a lack of digital tools, and a dependency on the internet. Strengthening self-directed learning and improving the technical infrastructure are required, to advance innovation-centric education from "teaching" to "learning" and to develop digital literacy. By incorporating technology into classroom instruction everyone can understand the concepts and realize their right to education. The recent technological advances in deep learning are referred to as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The GANs used as an Assistive Technology (AT) to generate the sequence of images of the descriptive input text. The goal of this review is the Visual Storytelling by utilizing the Text-to-Image GAN which strengthens self-directed learning through visualization and improve the critical thinking, and logical reasoning. © 2022 IEEE

Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Approaches for Sentiment Analysis of Students' Online Learning Feedback during Covid-19

Sentiment analysis aids in determining if a person's feelings are neutral, negative, or positive. Many machine learning and deep learning algorithms exist for assessing people's attitudes on various social media networks. Many researchers focused on students' emotional identification. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the sentiments of academic students regarding the online class experience conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic situation. For this work, the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) model is used for the feature extraction and comparison of eight machine learning models were tested for the classification, such as Support Vector Classifier, Multinomial Na�ve Bayes, Decision Tree, K-Nearest-Neighbors (KNN), Random Forest, AdaBoost Classifier, Bagging Classifier, Extreme Gradient Boosting Classifier (XGB) and F-Score, accuracy, precision, and Recall are the performance criteria examined. With a test accuracy of 0.97 and precision of 1.0, Multinomial Naive Bayes achieves the highest accurate model.

Smarter Sustainable Tourism: Data-Driven Multi-Perspective Parameter Discovery for Autonomous Design and Operations

Global natural and manmade events are exposing the fragility of the tourism industry and its impact on the global economy. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism contributed 10.3% to the global GDP and employed 333 million people but saw a significant decline due to the pandemic. Sustainable and smart tourism requires collaboration from all stakeholders and a comprehensive understanding of global and local issues to drive responsible and innovative growth in the sector. This paper presents an approach for leveraging big data and deep learning to discover holistic, multi-perspective (e.g., local, cultural, national, and international), and objective information on a subject. Specifically, we develop a machine learning pipeline to extract parameters from the academic literature and public opinions on Twitter, providing a unique and comprehensive view of the industry from both academic and public perspectives. The academic-view dataset was created from the Scopus database and contains 156,759 research articles from 2000 to 2022, which were modelled to identify 33 distinct parameters in 4 categories: Tourism Types, Planning, Challenges, and Media and Technologies. A Twitter dataset of 485,813 tweets was collected over 18 months from March 2021 to August 2022 to showcase the public perception of tourism in Saudi Arabia, which was modelled to reveal 13 parameters categorized into two broader sets: Tourist Attractions and Tourism Services. The paper also presents a comprehensive knowledge structure and literature review of the tourism sector based on over 250 research articles. Discovering system parameters are required to embed autonomous capabilities in systems and for decision-making and problem-solving during system design and operations. The work presented in this paper has significant theoretical and practical implications in that it improves AI-based information discovery by extending the use of scientific literature, Twitter, and other sources for autonomous, holistic, dynamic optimizations of systems, promoting novel research in the tourism sector and contributing to the development of smart and sustainable societies. © 2023 by the authors.

COVID-Twitter-BERT: A natural language processing model to analyse COVID-19 content on Twitter.

Introduction: This study presents COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT-BERT), a transformer-based model that is pre-trained on a large corpus of COVID-19 related Twitter messages. CT-BERT is specifically designed to be used on COVID-19 content, particularly from social media, and can be utilized for various natural language processing tasks such as classification, question-answering, and chatbots. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of CT-BERT on different classification datasets and compare it with BERT-LARGE, its base model. Methods: The study utilizes CT-BERT, which is pre-trained on a large corpus of COVID-19 related Twitter messages. The authors evaluated the performance of CT-BERT on five different classification datasets, including one in the target domain. The model's performance is compared to its base model, BERT-LARGE, to measure the marginal improvement. The authors also provide detailed information on the training process and the technical specifications of the model. Results: The results indicate that CT-BERT outperforms BERT-LARGE with a marginal improvement of 10-30% on all five classification datasets. The largest improvements are observed in the target domain. The authors provide detailed performance metrics and discuss the significance of these results. Discussion: The study demonstrates the potential of pre-trained transformer models, such as CT-BERT, for COVID-19 related natural language processing tasks. The results indicate that CT-BERT can improve the classification performance on COVID-19 related content, especially on social media. These findings have important implications for various applications, such as monitoring public sentiment and developing chatbots to provide COVID-19 related information. The study also highlights the importance of using domain-specific pre-trained models for specific natural language processing tasks. Overall, this work provides a valuable contribution to the development of COVID-19 related NLP models.

Improved Fine-Tuning of In-Domain Transformer Model for Inferring COVID-19 Presence in Multi-Institutional Radiology Reports.

Building a document-level classifier for COVID-19 on radiology reports could help assist providers in their daily clinical routine, as well as create large numbers of labels for computer vision models. We have developed such a classifier by fine-tuning a BERT-like model initialized from RadBERT, its continuous pre-training on radiology reports that can be used on all radiology-related tasks. RadBERT outperforms all biomedical pre-trainings on this COVID-19 task (P<0.01) and helps our fine-tuned model achieve an 88.9 macro-averaged F1-score, when evaluated on both X-ray and CT reports. To build this model, we rely on a multi-institutional dataset re-sampled and enriched with concurrent lung diseases, helping the model to resist to distribution shifts. In addition, we explore a variety of fine-tuning and hyperparameter optimization techniques that accelerate fine-tuning convergence, stabilize performance, and improve accuracy, especially when data or computational resources are limited. Finally, we provide a set of visualization tools and explainability methods to better understand the performance of the model, and support its practical use in the clinical setting. Our approach offers a ready-to-use COVID-19 classifier and can be applied similarly to other radiology report classification tasks.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS AND PREDICTION OF POLARITY VACCINES BASED ON TWITTER DATA USING DEEP NLP TECHNIQUES

The global impact of COVID-19 has been significant and several vaccines have been developed to combat this virus. However, these vaccines have varying levels of efficacy and effectiveness in preventing illness and providing immunity. As the world continues to grapple with the ongoing pandemic, the development and distribution of effective vaccines remains a top priority, making monitoring prevention strategies mandatory and necessary to mitigate the spread of the disease. These vaccines have raised a huge debate on social networks and in the media about their effectiveness and secondary effects. This has generated big data, requiring intelligent tools capable of analyzing these data in depth and extracting the underlying knowledge and feelings. There is a scarcity of works that analyze feelings and the prediction of these feelings based on their estimated polarities at the same time. In this work, first, we use big data and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to extract the entities expressed in tweets about AstraZeneca and Pfizer and estimate their polarities;second, we use a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network to predict the polarities of these two vaccines in the future. To ensure parallel data treatment for large-scale processing via clustered systems, we use the Apache Spark Framework (ASF) which enables the treatment of massive amounts of data in a distributed way. Results showed that the Pfizer vaccine is more popular and trustworthy than AstraZeneca. Additionally, according to the predictions generated by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model, it is likely that Pfizer will continue to maintain its strong market position in the foreseeable future. These predictive analytics, which uses advanced machine learning techniques, have proven to be accurate in forecasting trends and identifying patterns in data. As such, we have confidence in the LSTM's prediction of Pfizer's ongoing dominance in the industry. © Hassan Badi, Imad Badi, Karim El Moutaouakil, Aziz Khamjane, Abdelkhalek Bahri 2022

Evolution of the Perceptions about Tourist Destinations Affected by Risk Events Using a PANAS-tDL Deep Learning Model

The tourism industry has dynamized the economy of the countries by offering places, as well as related tourism experiences, products, and services. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of these tourist destinations were affected by subjective perceptions of users on social networks, within stands out Twitter. To achieve an objective perception from user comments posted on Twitter in front of a tourist destination, we propose a PANAS-tDL (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule - Deep Learning) model which integrates into a single structure a neural model inspired by a Stacked neural deep learning model (SDL), as well as the PANAS-t methodology. For this process, a database of comments was available for four destinations (Colombia, Italy, Spain, USA), and its tourist's products and services, before and in the context of COVID-19 pandemic throughout the year 2020. The proposed model made it possible to generate objective perceptions of the tourist destinations and their products and services using an automatic classification of comments in each category defined by the PANAS-t methodology (11-sentiments). The results show how users' perceptions were towards the negative sentiment zone defined by this methodology, according to the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide throughout the year 2020. The proposed model also integrated an automatic process of normalisation, lemmatisation and tokenisation (Natural language process - NLP) for the objective characterization of perceptions, and due to its capacity for adaption and learning, it can be extended for the evaluation of new tourist destinations, products or services using comments from different social networks. Copyright © 2021 by Author/s and Licensed by Veritas Publications Ltd., UK.

A statistical analysis of tweets on covid-19 vaccine hesitancy utilizing opinion mining: an Indian perspective.

The world witnessed the emergence of a deadly virus in December 2019, later named COVID-19. The virus was found to be highly contagious, and so people across the world were highly prone to be affected by the virus. Being a virus-borne disease, developing a vaccine was one of the most promising remedies. Thus, research organizations across the globe started working on developing the vaccine. However, it was later found by many researchers that a large number of people were hesitant to receive the vaccine. This paper aims to study the acceptance and hesitancy levels of people in India and compares them with the acceptance and hesitancy levels of people from the UK, the USA, and the rest of the world by analyzing their tweets on Twitter. For this study, 2,98,452 tweets were fetched from January 2020 to March 2022 from Twitter, and 1,84,720 tweets from 1,22,960 unique users were selected based on their country of origin. Machine learning based Sentiment analysis is then used to evaluate and analyze the tweets. The paper also proposes an NLP-based algorithm to perform opinion mining on Twitter data. The study found the public sentiment of the Indian population to be 63% positive, 28% neutral, and 9% negative. While the worldwide sentiment distribution is 45% positive, 34% neutral, and 21% negative, the USA has 42% positive, 34% neutral, and 23% negative and the UK has 50% positive, 29% neutral, and 21% negative. Also, sentiment analysis for individual vaccines in Indian context resulted in "Covaxin" with the highest positive sentiment at 43% followed by "Covishield" at 36%. The outcome of this work yields an insight into the public perception of the COVID-19 vaccine and thus can be used to formulate policies for existing and future vaccine campaigns. This study becomes more relevant as it is the consolidated opinion of Indian people, which is versatile in nature.

Towards a soft three-level voting model (Soft T-LVM) for fake news detection.

Fake news has a worldwide impact and the potential to change political scenarios and human behavior, especially in a critical time like the COVID-19 pandemic. This work suggests a Soft Three-Level Voting Model (Soft T-LVM) for automatically classifying COVID-19 fake news. We train different individual machine learning algorithms and different ensemble methods in order to overcome the weakness of individual models. This novel model is based on the soft-voting technique to calculate the class with the majority of votes and to choose the classifiers to merge and apply at every level. We use the Grid search method to tune the hyper-parameters during the process of classification and voting. The experimental evaluation confirms that our proposed model approach has superior performance compared to the other classifiers.

PRESTOapp for health workers with mental health symptoms related to the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant impact on the mental health of health workers that has brought many hospitals to launch immediate preventive mental health programs. Objective(s): (1) To adapt and enhance a smartphone app (PRESTOapp) for health workers with mental health symptoms related to the COVID-19, and (2) to demonstrate its potential effectiveness in significantly reducing anxiety-depressive and PTSD symptoms in this population. We aim to incorporate Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based techniques in a chatbot userinterface that will enable a more personalized and accurate monitoring and intervention. Method(s): An 18-months study with a 6-months preliminary phase to adapt PRESTOapp to health workers, enhance it with NLP-based techniques and chatbot user-interface, and evaluate its feasibility, and effectiveness in 12-months. Result(s): PRESTOapp has the potential to provide a prompt, personalized and integral response to the mental health demand due to the COVID-19. It will help by providing an innovative digital platform, that will allow remote monitoring of the symptoms course, provide brief psychotherapeutic interventions, and detect urgent situations. If the preliminary results of this study point to a potential effectiveness of the intervention, PRESTOapp may be easily adapted to the general population. Conclusion(s): PRESTOapp may be one of the key digital platforms that may help preventing and treating potentially severe mental health consequences. Considering the unresolved problem of burnout in health workers even before the COVID-19, this project will develop the necessary technology for implementing cost-effective mental health solutions, not only during the pandemic.

Analysis of Public Sentiment on COVID-19 Mitigation Measures in Social Media in the United States Using Machine Learning

Public sentiment can impact the implementation of public policies and even cause policy failure if public support is not received. Therefore, knowledge of public sentiment concerning new and emerging policies is critical for policymakers. During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, several precautionary measures have been suggested in an attempt to delay or mitigate the spread of the virus. This study presents a framework that applies natural language processing (NLP) techniques, such as sentiment and bigram analyses, to characterize the public sentiment on three prominent mitigation measures (mask wearing, social distancing, and quarantine) as shared by Twitter users in the United States. As part of the framework, we apply a bigram graph-based approach to visualize the most frequent topics in Twitter discussions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective is to provide insights into the most commonly discussed topics among Twitter users with similar demographic characteristics (e.g., age and gender). The sentiment and bigram analyses identified the most frequently discussed topics expressing both positive and negative sentiments among different age and gender groups. Discussions containing positive sentiment prevailed and revolved around the benefits of the measures and trust in the government, while the topics of negative sentiment involved conspiracy theories, skepticism, and distrust of government mandates. It is also notable that the discussions among people 19–29 and over 40 years old focus on government officials and political parties, benefits or inefficiency of mitigation measures, and conspiracy theories more often than other demographic groups. Our proposed approaches and results offer a novel and potentially valuable contribution to public policymakers. IEEE

COVID-19 Vaccine Infodemiology using Unsupervised Natural Language Processing

COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in excess mortality globally and presented an unprecedented challenge to people's lives. Despite the benefits of getting a COVID-19 vaccine, there have been arguments against the available vaccines and vaccine hesitancy worldwide. In this work, we analyze the information published by the public on Reddit as a digital forum, using unsupervised natural language processing to discover useful insights from the collected data related to COVID-19 vaccines, and validate the results of our study using Google Trends. Our results show that the government's contributions to the vaccination process, vaccine side-effects, and opposition to vaccine mandate and lock-downs are the main concerns shared by the public on digital forums. Moreover, we provide our collected data publicly available for further infodemiology studies by researchers and practitioners. © 2022 IEEE.