The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has greatly influenced people's daily lives across the globe. Emergent measures and policies (e.g., lockdown, social distancing) have been taken by governments to combat this highly infectious disease. However, people's mental health is also at risk due to the long-time strict social isolation rules. Hence, monitoring people's mental health across various events and topics will be extremely necessary for policy makers to make the appropriate decisions. On the other hand, social media have been widely used as an outlet for people to publish and share their personal opinions and feelings. The large scale social media posts (e.g., tweets) provide an ideal data source to infer the mental health for people during this pandemic period. In this work, we propose a novel framework to analyze the topic and sentiment dynamics due to COVID-19 from the massive social media posts. Based on a collection of 13 million tweets related to COVID-19 over two weeks, we found that the positive sentiment shows higher ratio than the negative sentiment during the study period. When zooming into the topic-level analysis, we find that different aspects of COVID-19 have been constantly discussed and show comparable sentiment polarities. Some topics like "stay safe home" are dominated with positive sentiment. The others such as "people death" are consistently showing negative sentiment. Overall, the proposed framework shows insightful findings based on the analysis of the topic-level sentiment dynamics.

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The outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been ongoing for almost two years and has had an unprecedented impact on the daily lives of people around the world. More recently, the emergence of the Delta variant of COVID-19 has once again put the world at risk. Fortunately, many countries and companies have developed vaccines for the coronavirus. As of 23 August 2021, more than 20 vaccines have been approved by the World Health Organization (WHO), bringing light to people besieged by the pandemic. The global rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine has sparked much discussion on social media platforms, such as the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine. However, there has not been much systematic analysis of public opinion on the COVID-19 vaccine. In this study, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the discussions related to the COVID-19 vaccine on Twitter. We analyze the hot topics discussed by people and the corresponding emotional polarity from the perspective of countries and vaccine brands. The results show that most people trust the effectiveness of vaccines and are willing to get vaccinated. In contrast, negative tweets tended to be associated with news reports of post-vaccination deaths, vaccine shortages, and post-injection side effects. Overall, this study uses popular Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies to mine people’s opinions on the COVID-19 vaccine on social media and objectively analyze and visualize them. Our findings can improve the readability of the confusing information on social media platforms and provide effective data support for the government and policy makers.

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