Thakur, N.; Duggal, Y.N.; Liu, Z. Analyzing Public Reactions, Perceptions, and Attitudes during the MPox Outbreak: Findings from Topic Modeling of Tweets. Computers2023, 12, 191.
Thakur, N.; Duggal, Y.N.; Liu, Z. Analyzing Public Reactions, Perceptions, and Attitudes during the MPox Outbreak: Findings from Topic Modeling of Tweets. Computers 2023, 12, 191.
Thakur, N.; Duggal, Y.N.; Liu, Z. Analyzing Public Reactions, Perceptions, and Attitudes during the MPox Outbreak: Findings from Topic Modeling of Tweets. Computers2023, 12, 191.
Thakur, N.; Duggal, Y.N.; Liu, Z. Analyzing Public Reactions, Perceptions, and Attitudes during the MPox Outbreak: Findings from Topic Modeling of Tweets. Computers 2023, 12, 191.
Abstract
In the last decade and a half, the world has experienced the outbreak of a range of viruses such as COVID-19, H1N1, flu, Ebola, Zika Virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Measles, and West Nile Virus, just to name a few. During these virus outbreaks, the usage and effectiveness of social media platforms increased significantly as such platforms served as virtual communities, enabling their users to share and exchange information, news, perspectives, opinions, ideas, and comments related to the outbreaks. Analysis of this Big Data of conversations related to virus outbreaks using concepts of Natural Language Processing such as Topic Modeling has attracted the attention of researchers from different disciplines such as Healthcare, Epidemiology, Data Science, Medicine, and Computer Science. The recent outbreak of the MPox virus has resulted in a tremendous increase in the usage of Twitter. Prior works in this field have primarily focused on the sentiment analysis and content analysis of these Tweets, and the few works that have focused on topic modeling have multiple limitations. This paper aims to address this research gap and makes two scientific contributions to this field. First, it presents the results of performing Topic Modeling on 601,432 Tweets about the 2022 Mpox outbreak, which were posted on Twitter between May 7, 2022, and March 3, 2023. The results indicate that the conversations on Twitter related to Mpox during this time range may be broadly categorized into four distinct themes - Views and Perspectives about MPox, Updates on Cases and Investigations about Mpox, MPox and the LGBTQIA+ Community, and MPox and COVID-19. Second, the paper presents the findings from the analysis of these Tweets. The results show that the theme that was most popular on Twitter (in terms of the number of Tweets posted) during this time range was - Views and Perspectives about MPox. It is followed by the theme of MPox and the LGBTQIA+ Community, which is followed by the themes of MPox and COVID-19 and Updates on Cases and Investigations about Mpox, respectively. Finally, a comparison with prior works in this field is also presented to highlight the novelty and significance of this research work.
Keywords
MPox; big data; data analysis; data science; Twitter; natural language processing
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Public Health and Health Services
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
