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Purpose The novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which started in late December 2019, has spread to more than 200 countries. As no vaccine is yet available for this pandemic, government and health agencies are taking draconian steps to contain it. This pandemic is also trending on social media, particularly on Twitter. The purpose of this study is to explore and analyze the general public reactions to the COVID-19 outbreak on Twitter. Design/methodology/approach This study conducts a thematic analysis of COVID-19 tweets through VOSviewer to examine people’s reactions related to the COVID-19 outbreak in the world. Moreover, sequential pattern mining (SPM) techniques are used to find frequent words/patterns and their relationship in tweets. Findings Seven clusters (themes) were found through VOSviewer: Cluster 1 (green): public sentiments about COVID-19 in the USA. Cluster 2 (red): public sentiments about COVID-19 in Italy and Iran and a vaccine, Cluster 3 (purple): public sentiments about doomsday and science credibility. Cluster 4 (blue): public sentiments about COVID-19 in India. Cluster 5 (yellow): public sentiments about COVID-19’s emergence. Cluster 6 (light blue): public sentiments about COVID-19 in the Philippines. Cluster 7 (orange): Public sentiments about COVID-19 US Intelligence Report. The most frequent words/patterns discovered with SPM were “COVID-19,” “Coronavirus,” “Chinese virus” and the most frequent and high confidence sequential rules were related to “Coronavirus, testing, lockdown, China and Wuhan.” Research limitations/implications The methodology can be used to analyze the opinions/thoughts of the general public on Twitter and to categorize them accordingly. Moreover, the categories (generated by VOSviewer) can be correlated with the results obtained with pattern mining techniques. Social implications This study has a significant socio-economic impact as Twitter offers content posting and sharing to billions of users worldwide. Originality/value According to the authors’ best knowledge, this may be the first study to carry out a thematic analysis of COVID-19 tweets at a glance and mining the tweets with SPM to investigate how people reacted to the COVID-19 outbreak on Twitter.

Purpose Twitter users’ generated data, known as tweets, are now not only used for communication and opinion sharing, but they are considered an important source of trendsetting, future prediction, recommendation systems and marketing. Using network features in tweet modeling and applying data mining and deep learning techniques on tweets is gaining more and more interest. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, user interests are discovered from Twitter Trends using a modeling approach that uses network-based text data (tweets). First, the popular trends are collected and stored in separate documents. These data are then pre-processed, followed by their labeling in respective categories. Data are then modeled and user interest for each Trending topic is calculated by considering positive tweets in that trend, average retweet and favorite count. Findings The proposed approach can be used to infer users’ topics of interest on Twitter and to categorize them. Support vector machine can be used for training and validation purposes. Positive tweets can be further analyzed to find user posting patterns. There is a positive correlation between tweets and Google data. Practical implications The results can be used in the development of information filtering and prediction systems, especially in personalized recommendation systems. Social implications Twitter microblogging platform offers content posting and sharing to billions of internet users worldwide. Therefore, this work has significant socioeconomic impacts. Originality/value This study guides on how Twitter network structure features can be exploited in discovering user interests using tweets. Further, positive correlation of Twitter Trends with Google Trends is reported, which validates the correctness of the authors’ approach.