What Are People Concerned About During the Pandemic? Detecting Evolving Topics about COVID-19 from Twitter

With the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic affecting the lives of the citizens of over 200 countries, there is a need for policy makers and clinicians to understand public sentiment and track the spread of the disease. One of the sources for gaining valuable insight into public sentiment is through social media. This study aims to extract this insight by producing a list of the most discussed topics regarding COVID-19 on Twitter every week and monitoring the evolution of topics from week to week. This research will propose two topic mining that can handle a large-scale dataset—rolling online non-negative matrix factorization (Rolling-ONMF) and sliding online non-negative matrix factorization (Sliding-ONMF)—and compare the insights produced by both techniques. Each algorithm produces 425 topics over the course of 17 weeks. However, topics that have not evolved from one week to the next beyond a certain evolution threshold are consolidated into a single topic. Since the topics produced by the Rolling-ONMF algorithm each week depend on the topics from the previous week, we find that the Sliding-ONMF algorithm produces more varied topics each week; however, the topics produced by the Rolling-ONMF algorithm contain keywords that appear more consistent with each other when reviewing the terms manually. We also observe that the Sliding-ONMF algorithm is able to capture events that have shorter time frames rather than ones that last throughout many months while the Rolling-ONMF algorithm detects more general themes due to a higher average evolution score which leads to more topic consolidation. We have also conducted a qualitative analysis and grouped the detected topics into themes. A number of important themes such as government policy, economic crisis, COVID-19-related updates, COVID-19-related events, prevention, vaccines and treatments, and COVID-19 testing are identified. These reflected the concerns related to the pandemic expressed in social media.