Sentiments in R ussian Medical Professional Discourse during the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020)

Abstract: Medical discourse within the professional community has undeservingly received very sparse researchers’ attention. Medical professional discourse exists offline and online. We carried out sentiment analysis on titles and text descriptions of materials published on the Russian portal Mir Vracha (90,000 word forms approximately). The texts were generated by and for physicians. The materials include personal narratives describing participants’ professional experience, participants’ opinions about pandemic news and events in the professional sphere, and Russian reviews and discussion of papers published in international journals in English. We present the first results and discussion of the sentiment analysis of Russian online medical discourse. Based on the results of sentiment analysis and discourse analysis, we described the emotions expressed in the forum and the linguistic means the forum participants used to verbalise their attitudes and emotions while discussing the Covid-19 pandemic. The results showed prevalence of neutral texts in the publications since the medical professionals are interested in research materials and outcomes. In the discussions and personal narratives, the forum participants expressed negative sentiments by colloquial words and figurative language.

## introduction medical discourse exists in communication within the professional community and in doctor-patient communication. in communicative acts, a dominant participant is a healthcare professional who influences patient's social behaviour @xcite . researchers of doctor-patient communication described its institutional character, high level of bureaucratic and legislative regulation, peculiar professional ethics @xcite , and sensitivity to cultural diversity @xcite . meanwhile, medical online discourse within the professional community has undeservingly received sparse researchers' attention. healthcare professionals arrange communication to discuss studies and practical issues, to provide colleagues with an opinion summarizing a unique practical experience or a case study @xcite . the professionals communicate through online conferences, professional portals and professional crm platforms. in professional medical communication, a free discussion and prevalence of facts over sentiments match principles of evidence-based medicine. meanwhile, professionals are unable to avoid emotions while discussing medical subjects @xcite . the outburst of the covid-19 pandemics slightly changed the norms in medical professional communication motivating researchers and practitioners to publish raw data and promote a certain treatment @xcite . researchers' emotional involvement into scientific discussion jeopardises objectivity and independence of results and conclusions. the pandemic evokes public interest in medical professional discussions since the media spread controversial news about vaccine development and disease treatment. due to the interest, a description of medical discourse peculiarities is of importance for communication researchers and social media. in this paper, we characterise medical discourse within the professional community on a russian medical portal bringing into focus sentiments and linguistic means to express emotions in medical texts generated by and for professional physicians. the objective of our research is to discover sentiments in texts published on the medical professional forum and to describe a set of linguistic means to express the sentiments and emotions in the professional communication, especially in the context of current pandemics. to the best of our knowledge, sentiments and emotions in the russian medical professional discourse during the covid-19 pandemics have not been described yet. the remainder of the paper is organised as follows. we discuss the related work in section 2. we present our data collection and the methodology in section 3. next, we report our results in section 4 and provide detailed discussion in section 5. finally, we conclude the paper with section 6. ## related work in this section, we describe two groups of works closely related to our study, namely: medical discourse features and sentiment analysis of medical discourse. ## discussion the materials published on the mir vracha portal represent the medical professional discourse as it reveals itself in communication among healthcare professionals. to the best of our knowledge, we present the first results and discussion of the sentiment analysis of russian medical discourse online. the texts published on the forum reflect the intention to consider an individual practice against the backdrop of the current research materials. due to the interest in the research, the most frequent words belong to 'research' and 'diagnosis' discourse categories. the topics of the physicians' publications on the professional portal differ from the popular topics in the communities on social media. zunic et al. @xcite showed that members of communities were interested in consideration of 'intervention' (medications, operations, etc.), while the russian healthcare professionals are focused on the 'research' and 'diagnosis' topics. the professionals did not discuss the subjects that were the most popular themes on twitter. abd-alrazaq et al. @xcite found out four main themes of the tweets devoted to the covid-19 pandemic: origin of the virus; its sources; its impact on people, countries, and the economy; and ways of mitigating the risk of infection. in july-august 2020, the russian healthcare professionals had been concentrating on the virus origin and the ways to recognise and to treat the disease. the difference in the set of themes between the professional community and ordinary users of social media reveals boundaries of the medical professional discourse. within the discourse, its semantic categories dominate in communication among competent professionals who are motivated to obtain more medical information and to offer 'technical' solutions. the topics of the publications (see peculiar terminology including latin terms is an essential constituent of medical discourse. complicated connections of terms reflect interactions of concepts and references to a subject, which are to be examined and described in various conditions. names of the diseases are the high frequency words in our materials. other terms were also in use on the portal; however, the forum participants used different terms according to the subject they discussed, so each term occurred twice or once. nevertheless, the terminology caused the algorithm of sentiment analysis to classify the publications on the mir vracha as neutral. meanwhile, in the communities on social media, texts patients suffering from cancer received essential differences in the sentiments (emotions and polarity: see @xcite ). the difference in the emotional attitude to the content between the professional community and the community of the patients reveals different communicative intentions and objectives as well as the medical discourse boundaries. along with the recent development of narrative medicine, the importance of professional social control brings doctor-patient communication into focus in medical discourse studies @xcite . meanwhile, online communication within the professional community shows patient centeredness through the frequency of words referring to patients and their experience @xcite . the patient centeredness is not obvious due to the scientific ideology of medical professional discourse, which brings into focus the 'research' category. since the scientific ideology supports finding a solution to current and forthcoming problems, the participants of the forum on the mir vracha portal discussed facts and case studies preferring to avoid emotional outbursts. sentiment analysis results show reasonable evaluation of the texts published on the medical professional portal. absence of emotional words in the list of high frequency words confirms the unessential contribution of the emotional expressions to the content of the medical professional discourse texts. the texts contain emotions and attitudes expressed by means of figurative language. meanwhile, doctor-patient communication on the internet shows instances of metaphors, metonyms, and idioms in written messages on forums @xcite . the professionals use a similar set of linguistic means to express emotions and attitudes in their communication within the community. the physicians expressed negative emotions caused by their professional experience during the current covid-19 pandemics appealing to irony as a tool to diminish the threat and the seriousness of the problem they must find a solution to. ## conclusion we carried out sentiment analysis on titles and text descriptions of materials published on the russian professional medical portal mir vracha (90,000 word forms approximately). to the best of our knowledge, we present the first results and discussion of the sentiment analysis of russian professional online medical discourse. the texts were generated by and for physicians and reflect the peculiarities of medical professional discourse. the medical professional discourse revealed in communication within the professional community is focused on the semantic categories 'research', 'diagnosis', 'intervention', 'bureaucracy'. the categories provide linguistic means to verbalise the professional activity and bureaucratic regulation of medical practice. based on the results of sentiment analysis and discourse analysis, we described the emotions expressed in the forum and linguistic means the forum participants used to verbalise their attitudes and emotions while discussing the covid-19 pandemic. the attitudes and emotions show negative sentiments manifested by colloquial words and figurative language. in further research, it is necessary to widen online medical professional communication materials for sentiment analysis in order to describe a thesaurus of sentiment linguistic means.