Understanding the Applications of Natural Language Processing on COVID-19 Data

In the digital age, the Internet has enabled the circulation of ideas and information and, in turn, has increased awareness among people. However, this does not come with its drawbacks. With the proliferation of online platforms, hoaxers can easily lure people towards their propagandist views or false news. The need to root out such false information and hate speech during this COVID-19 pandemic has never been more essential. The following study presents a survey of various papers that attempt to tackle similar problem statements with fake news, sentiment classification, and topic extraction. The paper focuses on how existing quality research can help improve the current state of research on COVID-19 related datasets by guiding researchers towards valuable procedures to help governmental authorities combat the rise in the spread of false news and malicious and hate comments.