Joanne Chen Lyu|Eileen Le Han|Garving K. Luli
COVID-19 Vaccine–Related Discussion on Twitter: Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis
University of California, San Francisco|University of Michigan–Ann Arbor|University of California, Davis
vaccination cornerstone prevention communicable infectious diseases however vaccines traditionally met public fear hesitancy covid19 vaccines exception social media use demonstrated play role low acceptance vaccinesthe aim study identify topics sentiments public covid19 vaccinerelated discussion social media discern salient changes topics sentiments time better understand public perceptions concerns emotions may influence achievement herd immunity goalstweets downloaded largescale covid19 twitter chatter data set march 11 2020 day world health organization declared covid19 pandemic january 31 2021 used r software clean tweets retain tweets contained keywords vaccination vaccinations vaccine vaccines immunization vaccinate vaccinated final data set included analysis consisted 1499421 unique tweets 583499 different users used r perform latent dirichlet allocation topic modeling well sentiment emotion analysis using national research council canada emotion lexicontopic modeling tweets related covid19 vaccines yielded 16 topics grouped 5 overarching themes opinions vaccination 2278401499421 tweets 152 tweeted topic remained highly discussed topic majority period examination vaccine progress around world became discussed topic around august 11 2020 russia approved worlds first covid19 vaccine advancement vaccine administration topic instruction getting vaccines gradually became salient became discussed topic first week january 2021 weekly mean sentiment scores showed despite fluctuations sentiment increasingly positive general emotion analysis showed trust predominant emotion followed anticipation fear sadness etc trust emotion reached peak november 9 2020 pfizer announced vaccine 90 effectivepublic covid19 vaccinerelated discussion twitter largely driven major events covid19 vaccines mirrored active news topics mainstream media discussion also demonstrated global perspective increasingly positive sentiment around covid19 vaccines dominant emotion trust shown social media discussion may imply higher acceptance covid19 vaccines compared previous vaccines