Aspect Based Twitter Sentiment Analysis on Vaccination and Vaccine Types in COVID-19 Pandemic With Deep Learning

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine development and community vaccination studies are carried out all over the world. At this stage, the opposition to the vaccine seen in the society or the lack of trust in the developed vaccine is an important factor hampering vaccination activities. In this study, aspect-base sentiment analysis was conducted for USA, U.K., Canada, Turkey, France, Germany, Spain and Italy showing the approach of twitter users to vaccination and vaccine types during the COVID-19 period. Within the scope of this study, two datasets in English and Turkish were prepared with 928,402 different vaccine-focused tweets collected by country. In the classification of tweets, 4 different aspects (policy, health, media and other) and 4 different BERT models (mBERT-base, BioBERT, ClinicalBERT and BERTurk) were used. 6 different COVID-19 vaccines with the highest frequency among the datasets were selected and sentiment analysis was made by using Twitter posts regarding these vaccines. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to understand people's views about vaccination and types of vaccines. With the experiments conducted, the results of the views of the people on vaccination and vaccine types were presented according to the countries. The success of the method proposed in this study in the F1 Score was between 84% and 88% in datasets divided by country, while the total accuracy value was 87%.

I. Introduction

Since January 2020, approximately 2.5 million people have lost their lives due to COVID-19 outbreak. According to recorded data, more than 110 million people were infected within a year [1]. Moreover, new cases continue to be reported every day in dozens of countries all over the world. According to the data reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 cases have been detected in 218 countries so far [2]. These data clearly show how great a threat this pandemic pose on the entire world population. Since the outbreak, various measures and restrictions have been implemented in many countries around the world to curb the pace of the pandemic. Teixeira et al. examined the countries that have done the most academic work on the Covid-19 pandemic and the organizations that have published the most articles. According to the results, 23634 original publications were made in the first 6 months of the pandemic [3].