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Background Social media serves as a vast repository of data, offering insights into public perceptions and emotions surrounding significant societal issues. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, long COVID (formally known as post–COVID-19 condition) has emerged as a chronic health condition, profoundly impacting numerous lives and livelihoods. Given the dynamic nature of long COVID and our evolving understanding of it, effectively capturing people’s sentiments and perceptions through social media becomes increasingly crucial. By harnessing the wealth of data available on social platforms, we can better track the evolving narrative surrounding long COVID and the collective efforts to address this pressing issue. Objective This study aimed to investigate people’s perceptions and sentiments around long COVID in Canada, the United States, and Europe, by analyzing English-language tweets from these regions using advanced topic modeling and sentiment analysis techniques. Understanding regional differences in public discourse can inform tailored public health strategies. Methods We analyzed long COVID–related tweets from 2021. Contextualized topic modeling was used to capture word meanings in context, providing coherent and semantically meaningful topics. Sentiment analysis was conducted in a zero-shot manner using Llama 2, a large language model, to classify tweets into positive, negative, or neutral sentiments. The results were interpreted in collaboration with public health experts, comparing the timelines of topics discussed across the 3 regions. This dual approach enabled a comprehensive understanding of the public discourse surrounding long COVID. We used metrics such as normalized pointwise mutual information for coherence and topic diversity for diversity to ensure robust topic modeling results. Results Topic modeling identified five main topics: (1) long COVID in people including children in the context of vaccination, (2) duration and suffering associated with long COVID, (3) persistent symptoms of long COVID, (4) the need for research on long COVID treatment, and (5) measuring long COVID symptoms. Significant concern was noted across all regions about the duration and suffering associated with long COVID, along with consistent discussions on persistent symptoms and calls for more research and better treatments. In particular, the topic of persistent symptoms was highly prevalent, reflecting ongoing challenges faced by individuals with long COVID. Sentiment analysis showed a mix of positive and negative sentiments, fluctuating with significant events and news related to long COVID. Conclusions Our study combines natural language processing techniques, including contextualized topic modeling and sentiment analysis, along with domain expert input, to provide detailed insights into public health monitoring and intervention. These findings highlight the importance of tracking public discourse on long COVID to inform public health strategies, address misinformation, and provide support to affected individuals. The use of social media analysis in understanding public health issues is underscored, emphasizing the role of emerging technologies in enhancing public health responses.
Background Social media serves as a vast repository of data, offering insights into public perceptions and emotions surrounding significant societal issues. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, long COVID (formally known as post–COVID-19 condition) has emerged as a chronic health condition, profoundly impacting numerous lives and livelihoods. Given the dynamic nature of long COVID and our evolving understanding of it, effectively capturing people’s sentiments and perceptions through social media becomes increasingly crucial. By harnessing the wealth of data available on social platforms, we can better track the evolving narrative surrounding long COVID and the collective efforts to address this pressing issue. Objective This study aimed to investigate people’s perceptions and sentiments around long COVID in Canada, the United States, and Europe, by analyzing English-language tweets from these regions using advanced topic modeling and sentiment analysis techniques. Understanding regional differences in public discourse can inform tailored public health strategies. Methods We analyzed long COVID–related tweets from 2021. Contextualized topic modeling was used to capture word meanings in context, providing coherent and semantically meaningful topics. Sentiment analysis was conducted in a zero-shot manner using Llama 2, a large language model, to classify tweets into positive, negative, or neutral sentiments. The results were interpreted in collaboration with public health experts, comparing the timelines of topics discussed across the 3 regions. This dual approach enabled a comprehensive understanding of the public discourse surrounding long COVID. We used metrics such as normalized pointwise mutual information for coherence and topic diversity for diversity to ensure robust topic modeling results. Results Topic modeling identified five main topics: (1) long COVID in people including children in the context of vaccination, (2) duration and suffering associated with long COVID, (3) persistent symptoms of long COVID, (4) the need for research on long COVID treatment, and (5) measuring long COVID symptoms. Significant concern was noted across all regions about the duration and suffering associated with long COVID, along with consistent discussions on persistent symptoms and calls for more research and better treatments. In particular, the topic of persistent symptoms was highly prevalent, reflecting ongoing challenges faced by individuals with long COVID. Sentiment analysis showed a mix of positive and negative sentiments, fluctuating with significant events and news related to long COVID. Conclusions Our study combines natural language processing techniques, including contextualized topic modeling and sentiment analysis, along with domain expert input, to provide detailed insights into public health monitoring and intervention. These findings highlight the importance of tracking public discourse on long COVID to inform public health strategies, address misinformation, and provide support to affected individuals. The use of social media analysis in understanding public health issues is underscored, emphasizing the role of emerging technologies in enhancing public health responses.
BACKGROUND Social media serves as a vast repository of data, offering insights into the perceptions and emotions surrounding significant societal issues. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Long COVID has emerged as a chronic health condition, profoundly affecting numerous lives and livelihoods. Given the dynamic nature of Long COVID and our evolving understanding of it, effectively capturing people's sentiments and perceptions through social media becomes increasingly crucial. By harnessing the wealth of data available on social platforms, we can better track the evolving narrative surrounding Long COVID and the collective efforts to address this pressing issue. OBJECTIVE We aimed to investigate people’s perceptions and sentiments around Long COVID in Canada, the US, and English-speaking Europe, including the UK. METHODS We analyzed Long COVID–related tweets from 2021 using topic modeling and sentiment analysis, and interpreted the results with public health experts. We compared timelines of topics discussed across the three English-speaking regions, and also explored sentiments associated with the tweets. RESULTS Topic modeling identified five topics, and public health experts provided interpretations of the topics based on visualization, top-ranked salient terms, and representative tweets for each topic. The interpretation for each topic was not entirely distinct from one topic to the next, resulting in difficulty identifying clear patterns when analyzing the prominence of these topics over time. However, there appeared to be an overall increasing trend in the topic of duration and suffering associated with Long COVID across the regions, consistent with the increasing burden of and awareness around Long COVID as the pandemic progressed and the number of people living with Long COVID increased. CONCLUSIONS Analysis aided by natural language processing techniques and domain expert input has the potential to produce useful insights for public health monitoring and action. This study explored the use of topic modeling and sentiment analysis on Long COVID–related tweets in Canada, the US, and English-speaking Europe. This kind of information could serve as one input in public health monitoring and surveillance systems by providing a high-level understanding of the frequency and predominance of discussions and sentiments pertaining to public health issues such as Long COVID, as well as to future efforts to address such issues.
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