Exploring the health care system’s representation in the media through hierarchical topic modeling

Abstract

As a large social structure, the health care system is often reflected in media publications. This creates a significant impact on society’s attitude towards the system and the state in general. In order to predict and correct state policies, media actions, and identify media shortcomings, it is necessary to analyze the image portrayed by the media and the public’s attitude towards it. In this article, we present the results of a multidirectional analysis of a corpus of media publications related to health care. We propose a method for analyzing the information image of health care formed by the mass media based on a topic model of a text corpus. The method evaluates reader interest in various healthcare topics, the dynamics of changes in publication sentiment, and the main information trends. The article presents the results of analyzing a corpus of mass media publications in Kazakhstan from January 2020 to January 2023.

Keywords:

• Health care
• mass media
• natural language processing
• topic modeling

Reviewing Editor:

• Chen Jenhui, Full Professor, Computer Science and Information Engineering, Chang Gung University, No. 259, Wen-Hwa 1st Road, Kweishan, Taoyuan, Taiwan

Subjects:

• Technology
• computer science, artificial intelligence, computer science (general), computing & IT security

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Science Committee of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Grant No. AP09259587, ‘Developing of methods and algorithms of intelligent GIS for multi-criteria analysis of healthcare data’ and Grant No. BR21881908, Complex of urban ecological support (CUES). This investigation develops results of the project ‘Development of methods of healthcare system risk and reliability evaluation under coronavirus outbreak’ which has been supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under Grant no. PP COVID-20-0013. The work was partially supported by the Integrated Infrastructure Operational Program for the project: Systemic Public Research Infrastructure - Biobank for Cancer and Rare diseases, ITMS: 313011AFG5, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund.