Integrated Infodemic Surveillance System: The Case of COVID-19 in South Korea

Abstract

This study merges multiple COVID-19 data sources from news articles and social media to propose an integrated infodemic surveillance system (IISS) that implements infodemiology for a well-tailored epidemic management policy. IISS is an à-la-carte infodemic surveillance solution that enables users to gauge the epidemic related consensus, which compiles epidemic-related data from multiple sources and equipped with various methodological toolkits - topic modeling, Word2Vec, and social network analysis. IISS can provide reliable empirical evidence for proper policymaking. We demonstrate the heuristic utilities of IISS using empirical data from the first wave of COVID-19 in South Korea. Measuring discourse congruence allows us to gauge the distance between the discourse corpus from different sources, which can highlight consensus and conflicts in epidemic discourse. Furthermore, IISS detects discrepancies between social concerns and main actors.