COVID-19 Vaccine Infodemiology using Unsupervised Natural Language Processing

Esmaeil Shakeri, Anja Slama, Roberto Souza, Behrouz Homayoun Far

Abstract: COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in excess mortality globally and presented an unprecedented challenge to people's lives. Despite the benefits of getting a COVID-19 vaccine, there have been arguments against the available vaccines and vaccine hesitancy worldwide. In this work, we analyze the information published by the public on Reddit as a digital forum, using unsupervised natural language processing to discover useful insights from the collected data related to COVID-19 vaccines, and validate the results of our study using Google Trends. Our results show that the government's contributions to the vaccination process, vaccine side-effects, and opposition to vaccine mandate and lock-downs are the main concerns shared by the public on digital forums. Moreover, we provide our collected data publicly available for further infodemiology studies by researchers and practitioners.