Public Opinion Mining Using Large Language Models on COVID-19 Related Tweets

Social media platforms have emerged as a significant source of public opinion, offering a massive user-generated data in which user-opinions are valuable if obtainable. Large language models (LLMs) have been in the spotlight recently with suggestions on the emergent abilities to solve tasks that are not explicitly trained for. Thus, this study explores the potential of utilizing LLMs for opinion mining on social media data by asking LLMs difficult questions, instead of simply asking whether the text's sentiment polarity is either positive, negative, or neutral. This study compares the LLM response statistics and the corresponding public surveys related to COVID-19, including the intention to take vaccination and the stress check. The results indicate that it is promising, but also challenging, to utilize LLMs for the tasks.