Research project
Tracking local public interest in COVID-19 topics using Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Start date: 1 December 2020
- End date: 31 March 2021
- Principal investigator: Dr Gary Graham, Leeds University Business School
- Co-investigators: Dr Serge Sharoff (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) and Dr Neil Winn (School of Politics and International Studies)
Description
The communication risks and effectiveness of public health policy communication in the West Yorkshire region in response to Covid-19 have not been considered in depth by either central or local health policy makers. The primary aim of this project therefore is to answer the question of how different mediated language translations by the media, the academic community, think tanks and social media of public health information (sourced from SAGE) are being interpreted by the public and stakeholders such as the emergency services and infrastructural workers at the frontline of the pandemic.
We aim to use evidence from publicly available texts in order to identify inflection points of citizens and city stakeholders throughout West Yorkshire towards different measures, and we aim to build detailed, three-month case studies of public responses to specific health risk campaign measures (i.e. the roll out of a vaccine).
This work was supported with funding from Research England QR-SPF.
