A Comparative NLP-Based Study on the Current Trends and Future Directions in COVID-19 Research

COVID-19 is a global health crisis that has altered human life and still promises to create ripples of death and destruction in its wake. The sea of scientific literature published over a short time-span to understand and mitigate this global phenomenon necessitates concerted efforts to organize our findings and focus on the unexplored facets of the disease. In this work, we applied natural language processing (NLP) based approaches on scientific literature published on COVID-19 to infer significant keywords that have contributed to our social, economic, demographic, psychological, epidemiological, clinical, and medical understanding of this pandemic. We identify key terms appearing in COVID literature that vary in representation when compared to other virus-borne diseases such as MERS, Ebola, and Influenza. We also identify countries, topics, and research articles that demonstrate that the scientific community is still reacting to the short-term threats such as transmissibility, health risks, treatment plans, and public policies, underpinning the need for collective international efforts towards long-term immunization and drug-related challenges. Furthermore, our study highlights several long-term research directions that are urgently needed for COVID-19 such as: global collaboration to create international open-access data repositories, policymaking to curb future outbreaks, psychological repercussions of COVID-19, vaccine development for SARS-CoV-2 variants and their long-term efficacy studies, and mental health issues in both children and elderly.