Analysis of the Correlation between Mass-Media Publication Activity and COVID-19 Epidemiological Situation in Early 2022

Abstract

The paper presents the results of a correlation analysis between the information trends in the electronic media of Kazakhstan and indicators of the epidemiological situation of COVID-19 according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The developed method is based on topic modeling and some other methods of processing natural language texts. The method allows for calculating the correlations between media topics, moods, the results of full-text search queries, and objective WHO data. The analysis of the results shows how the attitudes of society towards the problems of COVID-19 changed from 2021–2022. Firstly, the results reflect a steady trend of decreasing interest of electronic media in the topic of the pandemic, although to an unequal extent for different thematic groups. Secondly, there has been a tendency to shift the focus of attention to more pragmatic issues, such as remote learning problems, remote work, the impact of quarantine restrictions on the economy, etc.

Keywords

• natural language processing
• COVID-19
• mass media
• topic modeling