Using Natural Language Processing to Assess the Psychological Effect of COVID-19 Pandemic on Insomnia via Tweets: A Pre-Post Retrospective Pilot Study (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arash Maghsoudi ◽  
Sara Nowakowski ◽  
Ritwick Agrawal ◽  
Amir Sharafkhaneh ◽  
Sadaf Aram ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Temporal Analysis ◽  
Health Condition ◽  
Additional Stress ◽  
Mental Health Condition ◽  
Twitter Users

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed additional stress on population health that may result in a higher incidence of insomnia. In this study, we hypothesized that using natural language processing (NLP) to explore social media would help to identify the mental health condition of the population experiencing insomnia after the outbreak of COVID-19. OBJECTIVE In this study, we hypothesized that using natural language processing (NLP) to explore social media would help to identify the mental health condition of the population experiencing insomnia after the outbreak of COVID-19. METHODS We designed a pre-post retrospective study using public social media content from Twitter. We categorized tweets based on time into two intervals: prepandemic (01/01/2019 to 01/01/2020) and pandemic (01/01/2020 to 01/01/2021). We used NLP to analyze polarity (positive/negative) and intensity of emotions and also users’ tweets psychological states in terms of sadness, anxiety and anger by counting the words related to these categories in each tweet. Additionally, we performed temporal analysis to examine the effect of time on the users’ insomnia experience. RESULTS We extracted 268,803 tweets containing the word insomnia (prepandemic, 123,293 and pandemic, 145,510). The odds of negative tweets (OR, 1.31; 95% CI, 1.29-1.33), anger (OR, 1.19; 95% CI, 1.16-1.21), and anxiety (OR, 1.24; 95% CI: 1.21-1.26) were higher during the pandemic compared to prepandemic. The likelihood of negative tweets after midnight was higher than for other daily intevals, comprising approximately 60% of all negative insomnia-related tweets in 2020 and 2021 collectively. CONCLUSIONS Twitter users shared more negative tweets about insomnia during the pandemic than during the year before. Also, more anger and anxiety-related content were disseminated during the pandemic on the social media platform. Future studies using an NLP framework could assess tweets about other psychological distress, habit changes, weight gain due to inactivity, and the effect of viral infection on sleep.

scholarly journals A Pipeline to Understand Emerging Illness Via Social Media Data Analysis: Case Study on Breast Implant Illness (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vishal Dey ◽  
Peter Krasniak ◽  
Minh Nguyen ◽  
Clara Lee ◽  
Xia Ning
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Data Analysis ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Breast Implant ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Media Data

BACKGROUND A new illness can come to public attention through social media before it is medically defined, formally documented, or systematically studied. One example is a condition known as breast implant illness (BII), which has been extensively discussed on social media, although it is vaguely defined in the medical literature. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to construct a data analysis pipeline to understand emerging illnesses using social media data and to apply the pipeline to understand the key attributes of BII. METHODS We constructed a pipeline of social media data analysis using natural language processing and topic modeling. Mentions related to signs, symptoms, diseases, disorders, and medical procedures were extracted from social media data using the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System. We mapped the mentions to standard medical concepts and then summarized these mapped concepts as topics using latent Dirichlet allocation. Finally, we applied this pipeline to understand BII from several BII-dedicated social media sites. RESULTS Our pipeline identified topics related to toxicity, cancer, and mental health issues that were highly associated with BII. Our pipeline also showed that cancers, autoimmune disorders, and mental health problems were emerging concerns associated with breast implants, based on social media discussions. Furthermore, the pipeline identified mentions such as rupture, infection, pain, and fatigue as common self-reported issues among the public, as well as concerns about toxicity from silicone implants. CONCLUSIONS Our study could inspire future studies on the suggested symptoms and factors of BII. Our study provides the first analysis and derived knowledge of BII from social media using natural language processing techniques and demonstrates the potential of using social media information to better understand similar emerging illnesses. CLINICALTRIAL

scholarly journals Trend of Social Media News: A Viewpoint of COVID-19 Tweets Using Natural Language Processing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
AISDL
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
World Health ◽  
The World ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
The Developed Countries ◽  
Health Organization

The meteoric rise of social media news during the ongoing COVID-19 is worthy of advanced research. Freedom of speech in many parts of the world, especially the developed countries and liberty of socialization, calls for noteworthy information sharing during the panic pandemic. However, as a communication intervention during crises in the past, social media use is remarkable; the Tweets generated via Twitter during the ongoing COVID-19 is incomparable with the former records. This study examines social media news trends and compares the Tweets on COVID-19 as a corpus from Twitter. By deploying Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods on tweets, we were able to extract and quantify the similarities between some tweets over time, which means that some people say the same thing about the pandemic while other Twitter users view it differently. The tools we used are Spacy, Networkx, WordCloud, and Re. This study contributes to the social media literature by understanding the similarity and divergence of COVID-19 tweets of the public and health agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO). The study also sheds more light on the COVID-19 sparse and densely text network and their implications for the policymakers. The study explained the limitations and proposed future studies.

scholarly journals An Exploration of Impact of COVID 19 on mental health -Analysis of tweets using Natural Language Processing techniques

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sohini Sengupta ◽  
Sareeta Mugde ◽  
Garima Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Gold Mine ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Processing Techniques

Twitter is one of the world's biggest social media platforms for hosting abundant number of user-generated posts. It is considered as a gold mine of data. Majority of the tweets are public and thereby pullable unlike other social media platforms. In this paper we are analyzing the topics related to mental health that are recently (June, 2020) been discussed on Twitter. Also amidst the on-going pandemic, we are going to find out if covid-19 emerges as one of the factors impacting mental health. Further we are going to do an overall sentiment analysis to better understand the emotions of users.

scholarly journals Machine learning and natural language processing in mental health: a systematic review (Preprint)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aziliz Le Glaz ◽  
Yannis Haralambous ◽  
Deok-Hee Kim-Dufor ◽  
Philippe Lenca ◽  
Romain Billot ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Systematic Review ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Medical Databases

BACKGROUND Machine learning (ML) systems are parts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that automatically learn models from data in order to make better decisions. Natural Language Processing (NLP), by using corpora and learning approaches, provides good performance in statistical tasks, such as text classification or sentiment mining. OBJECTIVE The primary aim of this systematic review is to summarize and characterize studies that used ML and NLP techniques for mental health, in methodological and technical terms. The secondary aim is to consider the interest of these methods in the mental health clinical practice. METHODS This systematic review follows the PRISMA guidelines and is registered on PROSPERO. The research was conducted on 4 medical databases (Pubmed, Scopus, ScienceDirect and PsycINFO) with the following keywords: machine learning, data mining, psychiatry, mental health, mental disorder. The exclusion criteria are: languages other than English, anonymization process, case studies, conference papers and reviews. No limitations on publication dates were imposed. RESULTS 327 articles were identified, 269 were excluded, and 58 were included in the review. Results were organized through a qualitative perspective. Even though studies had heterogeneous topics and methods, some themes emerged. Population studies could be grouped into three categories: patients included in medical databases, patients who came to the emergency room, and social-media users. The main objectives were symptom extraction, severity of illness classification, comparison of therapy effectiveness, psychopathological clues, and nosography challenging. Data from electronic medical records and that from social media were the two major data sources. With regard to the methods used, preprocessing used the standard methods of NLP and unique identifier extraction dedicated to medical texts. Efficient classifiers were preferred rather than "transparent” functioning classifiers. Python was the most frequently used platform. CONCLUSIONS ML and NLP models have been highly topical issues in medicine in recent years and may be considered a new paradigm in medical research. However, these processes tend to confirm clinical hypotheses rather than developing entirely new knowledge,. and one major category of the population, social-media users, is obviously an imprecise cohort. In addition, some language-specific features can improve the performance of NLP methods, and their extension to other languages should be more closely investigated. However, ML and NLP techniques provide useful information from unexplored data (i.e., patient’s daily habits that are usually inaccessible to care providers). This may be considered to be an additional tool at every step of mental health care: diagnosis, prognosis, treatment efficacy and monitoring. Therefore, ethical issues – like predicting psychiatric troubles or involvement in the physician-patient relationship – remain and should be discussed in a timely manner. ML and NLP methods may offer multiple perspectives in mental health research but should also be considered as tools to support clinical practice. CLINICALTRIAL Number CRD42019107376

scholarly journals Natural language processing in mental health applications using non-clinical texts

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 649-685 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAFAEL A. CALVO ◽  
DAVID N. MILNE ◽  
M. SAZZAD HUSSAIN ◽  
HELEN CHRISTENSEN
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Computational Techniques ◽  
Mental Health Support ◽  
Psychological Assistance

AbstractNatural language processing (NLP) techniques can be used to make inferences about peoples’ mental states from what they write on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. These inferences can then be used to create online pathways to direct people to health information and assistance and also to generate personalized interventions. Regrettably, the computational methods used to collect, process and utilize online writing data, as well as the evaluations of these techniques, are still dispersed in the literature. This paper provides a taxonomy of data sources and techniques that have been used for mental health support and intervention. Specifically, we review how social media and other data sources have been used to detect emotions and identify people who may be in need of psychological assistance; the computational techniques used in labeling and diagnosis; and finally, we discuss ways to generate and personalize mental health interventions. The overarching aim of this scoping review is to highlight areas of research where NLP has been applied in the mental health literature and to help develop a common language that draws together the fields of mental health, human-computer interaction and NLP.

scholarly journals A Pipeline to Understand Emerging Illness Via Social Media Data Analysis: Case Study on Breast Implant Illness

10.2196/29768 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. e29768
Author(s):  
Vishal Dey ◽  
Peter Krasniak ◽  
Minh Nguyen ◽  
Clara Lee ◽  
Xia Ning
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Data Analysis ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Breast Implant ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Media Data

Background A new illness can come to public attention through social media before it is medically defined, formally documented, or systematically studied. One example is a condition known as breast implant illness (BII), which has been extensively discussed on social media, although it is vaguely defined in the medical literature. Objective The objective of this study is to construct a data analysis pipeline to understand emerging illnesses using social media data and to apply the pipeline to understand the key attributes of BII. Methods We constructed a pipeline of social media data analysis using natural language processing and topic modeling. Mentions related to signs, symptoms, diseases, disorders, and medical procedures were extracted from social media data using the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System. We mapped the mentions to standard medical concepts and then summarized these mapped concepts as topics using latent Dirichlet allocation. Finally, we applied this pipeline to understand BII from several BII-dedicated social media sites. Results Our pipeline identified topics related to toxicity, cancer, and mental health issues that were highly associated with BII. Our pipeline also showed that cancers, autoimmune disorders, and mental health problems were emerging concerns associated with breast implants, based on social media discussions. Furthermore, the pipeline identified mentions such as rupture, infection, pain, and fatigue as common self-reported issues among the public, as well as concerns about toxicity from silicone implants. Conclusions Our study could inspire future studies on the suggested symptoms and factors of BII. Our study provides the first analysis and derived knowledge of BII from social media using natural language processing techniques and demonstrates the potential of using social media information to better understand similar emerging illnesses.

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