covidphtext: Utilities to Extract Text Data From COVID-19-Related Resolutions and Policies From the Philippines 
To assess possible impact of various COVID-19 prediction models on Philippine government response, text from various resolutions issued by the Inter-agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) has been collected using data mining approaches implemented in R. This package includes functions used for this data mining process and datasets of text that have been collected and processed for use in text analysis.
Installation
covidphtext is not yet available on CRAN. It is currently in active development stage. Installation of covidphtext at this point is only possible through its development version via GitHub:
if(!require(remotes)) install.packages("remotes") remotes::install_github("como-ph/covidphtext")
then load the package:
library(covidphtext)
Usage
Datasets
covidphtext currently has 69 datasets of which 65 are COVID-19-related resolutions and policies in the Philippines made by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF), 1 is the Omnibus Guidelines on the Implementation of Community Quarantine in the Philippines released by the IATF and 2 are reference lists of links to these resolutions and guidelines.
A description of the available datasets can be found here.
The IATF resolutions are officially available from two online sources: 1) The Department of Health (DoH) website; and, 2) The Philippines Official Gazette website. The DOH website currently only holds IATF resolutions starting from resolution number 9 and later. The Official Gazette on the other hand contains resolutions 1 to the most current.
To get a list of the IATF resolutions that are available from the DOH website, the function get_iatf_links() can be used as follows:
get_iatf_links() #> # A tibble: 74 x 7 #> id title date source type url checked #> <dbl> <chr> <date> <chr> <chr> <chr> <date> #> 1 9 Recommendations f… 2020-03-03 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> 2 10 Recommendations f… 2020-03-09 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> 3 11 Recommendations f… 2020-03-12 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> 4 12 Recommendations f… 2020-03-13 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> 5 13 Recommendations f… 2020-03-17 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> 6 14 Resolutions Relat… 2020-03-20 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> 7 15 Resolutions Relat… 2020-03-25 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> 8 16 Additional Guidel… 2020-03-30 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> 9 17 Recommendations R… 2020-03-30 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> 10 18 Recommendations R… 2020-04-01 IATF reso… https://doh.gov.… 2020-08-04 #> # … with 64 more rows
Given that the DOH website doesn’t have the first 8 resolutions, this function will soon be deprecated in favour of the newer function below that interfaces with the Official Gazette.
A table of all the IATF resolutions and the URLs to download them can be generated using the newer function get_iatf_gazette() as follows:
list_iatf_pages(base = "https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/section/laws/other-issuances/inter-agency-task-force-for-the-management-of-emerging-infectious-diseases-resolutions/", pages = 1:6) %>% get_iatf_pages() %>% get_iatf_gazette()
#> # A tibble: 73 x 7
#> id title date source type url checked
#> <dbl> <chr> <date> <chr> <chr> <chr> <date>
#> 1 60 RESOLUTION NO. 60… 2020-07-30 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> 2 60 RESOLUTION NO. 60… 2020-07-30 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> 3 59 RESOLUTION NO. 59… 2020-07-28 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> 4 58 RESOLUTION NO. 58… 2020-07-23 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> 5 57 RESOLUTION NO. 57… 2020-07-21 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> 6 NA OMNIBUS GUIDELINE… 2020-07-16 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> 7 56 RESOLUTION NO. 56… 2020-07-16 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> 8 55 RESOLUTION NO. 55… 2020-07-14 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> 9 55 RESOLUTION NO. 55… 2020-07-14 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> 10 54 RESOLUTION NO. 54… 2020-07-11 IATF reso… https://www.offi… 2020-08-02
#> # … with 63 more rowsThe actual PDF of the IATF resolutions/s can be downloaded using the get_iatf_pdfs() function. For example, to download IATF Resolution No. 29, the following command is issued:
get_iatf_pdfs(links = iatfLinks, id = 29) #> iatfResolution29 #> "/var/folders/fk/s0yv8hhn2cs_nfsmzhm4dmhc0000gn/T//RtmpOtmTrk/file263d25fd8821"
The command downloads the PDF of the specified IATF Resolution into a temporary directory (using tempdir() function). The output of the get_iatf_pdfs() function is a named character vector of directory path/s to downloaded PDFs as shown above. The names of the character vector correspond to the resolution number. These paths can then be used when working with these files.
The get_iatf_pdfs() function interfaces with both the DOH and The Official Gazette website.
Concatenating text datasets
The datasets described above can be processed and analysed on their own or as a combined corpus of text data. covidphtext provides convenience functions that concatenates all or specific text datasets available from the covidphtext package.
Concatenating datasets based on a specific search term
The combine_docs function allows the user to specify search terms to use in identifying datasets provided by the covidphtext package. The docs argument allows the specification of a vector of search terms to use to identify the names of datasets to concatenate. If the name/s of the datasets contain these search terms, the datasets with these name/s will be returned.
combine_docs(docs = "resolution") #> # A tibble: 7,728 x 7 #> linenumber text source type id section date #> <int> <chr> <chr> <chr> <dbl> <chr> <date> #> 1 1 Republic of the Philippin… IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> 2 2 Department of Health IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> 3 3 Office of the Secretary IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> 4 4 Inter-Agency Task Force f… IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> 5 5 Emerging Infectious Disea… IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> 6 6 28 January 2020 IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> 7 7 Resolution No. 01 IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> 8 8 Series of 2020 IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> 9 9 Recommendations for the M… IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> 10 10 Novel Coronavirus Situati… IATF resolu… 1 heading 2020-01-28 #> # … with 7,718 more rows
The combine_iatf function is a specialised wrapper of the combine_docs function that specifically returns datasets containing IATF resolutions. An additional argument res allows users to specify which IATF resolutions to return. To get IATF resolution 10, 11, and 12, the following call to combine_iatf is made as follows:
combine_iatf(docs = "resolution", res = 10:12) #> # A tibble: 351 x 7 #> linenumber text source type id section date #> <int> <chr> <chr> <chr> <dbl> <chr> <date> #> 1 1 Republic of the Philippines IATF resol… 10 heading 2020-03-09 #> 2 2 DOH DFA DILG DOJ DOLE DOT … IATF resol… 10 heading 2020-03-09 #> 3 3 Inter-Agency Task Force fo… IATF resol… 10 heading 2020-03-09 #> 4 4 Emerging Infectious Diseas… IATF resol… 10 heading 2020-03-09 #> 5 5 Resolution No. 10 IATF resol… 10 heading 2020-03-09 #> 6 6 Series of 2020 IATF resol… 10 heading 2020-03-09 #> 7 7 9 March 2020 IATF resol… 10 heading 2020-03-09 #> 8 8 Recommendations for the ma… IATF resol… 10 heading 2020-03-09 #> 9 9 disease 2019 (COVID-19) si… IATF resol… 10 heading 2020-03-09 #> 10 10 WHEREAS, Section 15 of Art… IATF resol… 10 preamb… 2020-03-09 #> # … with 341 more rows
To check if only resolutions 10 to 12 have been returned:
combine_iatf(docs = "resolution", res = 10:12)[ , c("type", "id")] #> # A tibble: 351 x 2 #> type id #> <chr> <dbl> #> 1 resolution 10 #> 2 resolution 10 #> 3 resolution 10 #> 4 resolution 10 #> 5 resolution 10 #> 6 resolution 10 #> 7 resolution 10 #> 8 resolution 10 #> 9 resolution 10 #> 10 resolution 10 #> # … with 341 more rows
