Understanding Weekly COVID-19 Concerns through Dynamic Content-Specific LDA Topic Modeling

Mohammadzaman Zamani, H. Andrew Schwartz, Johannes Eichstaedt, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Adithya Virinchipuram Ganesan, Sean Clouston, Salvatore Giorgi


Abstract
The novelty and global scale of the COVID-19 pandemic has lead to rapid societal changes in a short span of time. As government policy and health measures shift, public perceptions and concerns also change, an evolution documented within discourse on social media. We propose a dynamic content-specific LDA topic modeling technique that can help to identify different domains of COVID-specific discourse that can be used to track societal shifts in concerns or views. Our experiments show that these model-derived topics are more coherent than standard LDA topics, and also provide new features that are more helpful in prediction of COVID-19 related outcomes including social mobility and unemployment rate.
Anthology ID:
2020.nlpcss-1.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
David Bamman, Dirk Hovy, David Jurgens, Brendan O'Connor, Svitlana Volkova
Venue:
NLP+CSS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
193–198
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcss-1.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.nlpcss-1.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohammadzaman Zamani, H. Andrew Schwartz, Johannes Eichstaedt, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Adithya Virinchipuram Ganesan, Sean Clouston, and Salvatore Giorgi. 2020. Understanding Weekly COVID-19 Concerns through Dynamic Content-Specific LDA Topic Modeling. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science, pages 193–198, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Understanding Weekly COVID-19 Concerns through Dynamic Content-Specific LDA Topic Modeling (Zamani et al., NLP+CSS 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcss-1.21.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38940607
Code
 wwbp/weekly_covid_lda_topics