Abstract
Understanding the needs and fears of citizens, especially during a pandemic such as COVID-19, is essential for any government or legislative entity. An effective COVID-19 strategy further requires that the public understand and accept the restriction plans imposed by these entities. In this paper, we explore a causal mediation scenario in which we want to emphasize the use of NLP
methods in combination with methods from economics and social sciences. Based on sentiment analysis of Tweets towards the current COVID-19 situation in the UK and Sweden, we conduct several causal inference experiments and attempt to decouple the effect of government restrictions on mobility behavior from the effect that occurs due to public perception of the
COVID-19 strategy in a country. To avoid biased results we control for valid country specific epidemiological and time-varying confounders. Comprehensive experiments show that not all changes in mobility are caused by countries implemented policies but also by the support of individuals in the fight against this pandemic. We find that social media texts are an important source
to capture citizens’ concerns and trust in policy makers and are suitable to evaluate the success of government policies.
methods in combination with methods from economics and social sciences. Based on sentiment analysis of Tweets towards the current COVID-19 situation in the UK and Sweden, we conduct several causal inference experiments and attempt to decouple the effect of government restrictions on mobility behavior from the effect that occurs due to public perception of the
COVID-19 strategy in a country. To avoid biased results we control for valid country specific epidemiological and time-varying confounders. Comprehensive experiments show that not all changes in mobility are caused by countries implemented policies but also by the support of individuals in the fight against this pandemic. We find that social media texts are an important source
to capture citizens’ concerns and trust in policy makers and are suitable to evaluate the success of government policies.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference |
Pages | 211-226 |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2022 |
Event | 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference: LREC 2022 - Marseille, France Duration: 20 Jun 2022 → 25 Jun 2022 |
Conference
Conference | 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference |
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Abbreviated title | LREC 2022 |
Country/Territory | France |
City | Marseille |
Period | 20/06/22 → 25/06/22 |