Abstract
Internet forums and public social media, such as online healthcare forums, provide a convenient channel for users (people/patients) concerned about health issues to discuss and share information with each other. In late December 2019, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus (infection from which results in the disease named COVID-19) was reported, and, due to the rapid spread of the virus in other parts of the world, the World Health Organization declared a state of emergency. In this paper, we used automated extraction of COVID-19–related discussions from social media and a natural language process (NLP) method based on topic modeling to uncover various issues related to COVID-19 from public opinions. Moreover, we also investigate how to use LSTM recurrent neural network for sentiment classification of COVID-19 comments. Our findings shed light on the importance of using public opinions and suitable computational techniques to understand issues surrounding COVID-19 and to guide related decision-making.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
jelodar{at}njust.edu.cn, rita.orji{at}dal.ca, schuang6{at}126.com
Just We updated the co-authors. Thank you for your consideration.