A review on Natural Language Processing Models for COVID-19 research

Abstract

This survey paper reviews Natural Language Processing Models and their use in COVID-19 research in two main areas. Firstly, a range of transformer-based biomedical pretrained language models are evaluated using the BLURB benchmark. Secondly, models used in sentiment analysis surrounding COVID-19 vaccination are evaluated. We filtered literature curated from various repositories such as PubMed and Scopus and reviewed 27 papers. When evaluated using the BLURB benchmark, the novel T-BPLM BioLinkBERT gives groundbreaking results by incorporating document link knowledge and hyperlinking into its pretraining. Sentiment analysis of COVID-19 vaccination through various Twitter API tools has shown the public’s sentiment towards vaccination to be mostly positive. Finally, we outline some limitations and potential solutions to drive the research community to improve the models used for NLP tasks.

Keywords

• Natural Language Processing
• COVID-19
• Machine learning
• Transformer models
• Sentiment analysis