AUTHOR=Aldosery Aisha , Carruthers Robert , Kay Karandeep , Cave Christian , Reynolds Paul , Kostkova Patty 

TITLE=Enhancing public health response: a framework for topics and sentiment analysis of COVID-19 in the UK using Twitter and the embedded topic model

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1105383

DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2024.1105383

ISSN=2296-2565

ABSTRACT=In order to protect citizens during the Covid-19 pandemic unprecedented public health restrictions were imposed on everyday life in the UK and in the world. In emergencies like COVID-19, it is crucial for policymakers to be able to gauge the public response and sentiment to such measures in almost real time and establish best practice for the use of social media for emergency response. In this study, we explored Twitter as a data source for assessing public reaction to the pandemic. While much of the existing research focused on specific questions or new techniques, we developed a comprehensive framework foassessment of public response by policymakers for COVID-19 and generalizable for future emergencies.. We conducted an analysis of sentiment by topic using 25 million UK tweets, collected from 26th May 2020 to 8th March 2021.We combined innovative combination of sentiment analysis via a recurrent neural network and topic clustering through an embedded topic model. to produce granular insights into the public's perception of the pandemic's unfolding narrative and response to public health policy interventions. The results demonstrated interpretable per-topic sentiment signals across time and geography in the UK that could be tied to specific public health and policy events during the pandemic. Unique to this investigation is the juxtaposition of derived sentiment trends against behavioural surveys conducted by the UK Office for National Statistics, providing a robust gauge of the public mood concurrent with policy announcements The emergent methodology not only elucidates the public's stance on COVID-19 policies but also establishes a generalisable framework for for public policymakers to monitor and assess the buy-in and acceptance of their policies almost at real-time.. Further, the proposed approach is generalisable as a tool for policymakers and could be applied to further subjects of political and public interest. 25