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The paper presents the results of a correlation analysis between the information trends in the electronic media of Kazakhstan and indicators of the epidemiological situation of COVID-19 according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The developed method is based on topic modeling and some other methods of processing natural language texts. The method allows for calculating the correlations between media topics, moods, the results of full-text search queries, and objective WHO data. The analysis of the results shows how the attitudes of society towards the problems of COVID-19 changed from 2021–2022. Firstly, the results reflect a steady trend of decreasing interest of electronic media in the topic of the pandemic, although to an unequal extent for different thematic groups. Secondly, there has been a tendency to shift the focus of attention to more pragmatic issues, such as remote learning problems, remote work, the impact of quarantine restrictions on the economy, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media plays an important role in disseminating facts and knowledge to the public at critical times, and the COVID-19 pandemic is a good example of such a period. This research is devoted to performing a comparative analysis of the representation of topics connected with the pandemic in the internet media of Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation. The main goal of the research is to propose a method that would make it possible to analyze the correlation between mass media dynamic indicators and the World Health Organization COVID-19 data. In order to solve the task, three approaches related to the representation of mass media dynamics in numerical form—automatically obtained topics, average sentiment, and dynamic indicators—were proposed and applied according to a manually selected list of search queries. The results of the analysis indicate similarities and differences in the ways in which the epidemiological situation is reflected in publications in Russia and in Kazakhstan. In particular, the publication activity in both countries correlates with the absolute indicators, such as the daily number of new infections, and the daily number of deaths. However, mass media tend to ignore the positive rate of confirmed cases and the virus reproduction rate. If we consider strictness of quarantine measures, mass media in Russia show a rather high correlation, while in Kazakhstan, the correlation is much lower. Analysis of search queries revealed that in Kazakhstan the problem of fake news and disinformation is more acute during periods of deterioration of the epidemiological situation, when the level of crime and poverty increase. The novelty of this work is the proposal and implementation of a method that allows the performing of a comparative analysis of objective COVID-19 statistics and several mass media indicators. In addition, it is the first time that such a comparative analysis, between different countries, has been performed on a corpus in a language other than English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]