An easy numeric data augmentation method for early-stage COVID-19 tweets exploration of participatory dynamics of public attention and news coverage

With the onset of COVID-19, the pandemic has aroused huge discussions on social media like Twitter, followed by many social media analyses concerning it. Despite such an abundance of studies, however, little work has been done on reactions from the public and officials on social networks and their associations, especially during the early outbreak stage. In this paper, a total of 9,259,861 COVID-19-related English tweets published from 31 December 2019 to 11 March 2020 are accumulated for exploring the participatory dynamics of public attention and news coverage during the early stage of the pandemic. An easy numeric data augmentation (ENDA) technique is proposed for generating new samples while preserving label validity. It attains superior performance on text classification tasks with deep models (BERT) than an easier data augmentation method. To demonstrate the efficacy of ENDA further, experiments and ablation studies have also been implemented on other benchmark datasets. The classification results of COVID-19 tweets show tweets peaks trigged by momentous events and a strong positive correlation between the daily number of personal narratives and news reports. We argue that there were three periods divided by the turning points on January 20 and February 23 and the low level of news coverage suggests the missed windows for government response in early January and February. Our study not only contributes to a deeper understanding of the dynamic patterns and relationships of public attention and news coverage on social media during the pandemic but also sheds light on early emergency management and government response on social media during global health crises.