Leveraging Natural Language Processing to Mine Issues on Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The recent global outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has spread to all corners of the globe, introducing numerous social challenges. Twitter platforms have been used to identify public opinion about events at the local and global scale. In this study, we constructed a system to identify the relevant tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic throughout January 1st, 2020 to April 30th, 2020 and explored topic modeling to identify the most discussed topics and themes during this period. Additionally, we analyzed the temporal changes in the topics with respect to the events that occurred. We found eight topics were sufficient to identify the themes in our corpus. The dominant topics were found to vary over time and align with the events related to the COVID-19 pandemic.