Generalizing factors of COVID-19 vaccine attitudes in different regions: A summary generation and topic modeling approach

Abstract

Objective The goal of this study is to use summary generation and topic modeling to identify factors contributing to vaccine attitudes for three different vaccine brands, with the aim of generalizing these factors across different regions. Methods A total of 5562 tweets about three vaccine brands (Sinovac, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer) were collected from 14 December 2020 to 30 December 2021. BERTopic clustering is used to group the tweets into topics, and then contrastive learning (CL) is adopted to generate summaries of each topic. The main content of each topic is generalized into three factors that contribute to vaccine attitudes: vaccine-related factors, health system-related factors, and individual social attributes. Results BERTopic clustering outperforms Latent Dirichlet Allocation clustering in our analysis. It can also be found that using CL for summary generation helped to better model the topics, particularly at the center-point of the clustering. Our model identifies three main factors contributing to vaccine attitudes that are consistent across different regions. Conclusions Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of deep learning methods for identifying factors contributing to vaccine attitudes in different regions. By determining these factors, policymakers and medical institutions can develop more effective strategies for addressing concerns related to the vaccination process.