Title
Understanding the Issues Surrounding COVID-19 Vaccine Roll Out via User Tweets
Date Issued
01 January 2021
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Esparza J.
Ramesh A.
Seetharam A.
Baylor University
Publisher(s)
Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Abstract
Vaccinations have emerged as one of the key tools to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, reduce infections and to enable safe re-opening of societies. Vaccinating the entire world population is a challenging undertaking and with demand far exceeding supply in the world, it is expected that topics surrounding vaccinations generate a wide array of discussions. Therefore, in this paper, we collect data from Twitter during the early days of the COVID-19 vaccination program and adopt a linguistic approach to better understand and appreciate peoples’ concerns and opinions with regards to the roll out of the vaccines. We begin by studying the term frequencies (i.e., unigrams and bigrams) and observe discussions around vaccination doses, receiving doses, vaccine supply, scheduling appointments and wearing masks as the vaccination efforts get underway. We then adopt a seeded topic modeling approach to automatically identify the main topics of discussion in the tweets and the main issues being discussed in each topic. We observe that our dataset has nine distinct topics. For example, we observe topics related to vaccine distribution, eligibility, scheduling and COVID variants. We then study the sentiment of the tweets with respect to each of the nine topics and observe that the overall sentiment is negative for most of the topics. We only observe a higher percentage of positive sentiment for topics related to obtaining information and schools. Our research lays the foundation to conduct a more fine-grained analysis of the various issues faced by the people as the pandemic recedes over the course of the next few years.
Start page
197
End page
205
Volume
13116 LNCS
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Medios de comunicación, Comunicación socio-cultural Comunicación, Medios de comunicación
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85121870614
Source
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Resource of which it is part
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
ISSN of the container
03029743
ISBN of the container
9783030914332
Conference
10th International Conference on Computational Data and Social Networks, CSoNet 2021
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus