Sentiments in Russian Medical Professional Discourse during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Irina Ovchinnikova, Liana Ermakova, Diana Nurbakova


Abstract
Medical discourse within the professional community has undeservingly received very sparse researchers’ attention. Medical professional discourse exists offline and online. We carried out sentiment analysis on titles and text descriptions of materials published on the Russian portal Mir Vracha (90,000 word forms approximately). The texts were generated by and for physicians. The materials include personal narratives describing participants’ professional experience, participants’ opinions about pandemic news and events in the professional sphere, and Russian reviews and discussion of papers published in international journals in English. We present the first results and discussion of the sentiment analysis of Russian online medical discourse. Based on the results of sentiment analysis and discourse analysis, we described the emotions expressed in the forum and the linguistic means the forum participants used to verbalise their attitudes and emotions while discussing the Covid-19 pandemic. The results showed prevalence of neutral texts in the publications since the medical professionals are interested in research materials and outcomes. In the discussions and personal narratives, the forum participants expressed negative sentiments by colloquial words and figurative language.
Anthology ID:
2020.peoples-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotion's in Social Media
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Malvina Nissim, Viviana Patti, Barbara Plank, Esin Durmus
Venue:
PEOPLES
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
99–108
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.peoples-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Irina Ovchinnikova, Liana Ermakova, and Diana Nurbakova. 2020. Sentiments in Russian Medical Professional Discourse during the Covid-19 Pandemic. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotion's in Social Media, pages 99–108, Barcelona, Spain (Online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sentiments in Russian Medical Professional Discourse during the Covid-19 Pandemic (Ovchinnikova et al., PEOPLES 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.peoples-1.10.pdf