scholarly journals An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Information on Twitter in the Greater Region

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Ninghan Chen ◽  
Zhiqiang Zhong ◽  
Jun Pang

The outbreak of the COVID-19 led to a burst of information in major online social networks (OSNs). Facing this constantly changing situation, OSNs have become an essential platform for people expressing opinions and seeking up-to-the-minute information. Thus, discussions on OSNs may become a reflection of reality. This paper aims to figure out how Twitter users in the Greater Region (GR) and related countries react differently over time through conducting a data-driven exploratory study of COVID-19 information using machine learning and representation learning methods. We find that tweet volume and COVID-19 cases in GR and related countries are correlated, but this correlation only exists in a particular period of the pandemic. Moreover, we plot the changing of topics in each country and region from 22 January 2020 to 5 June 2020, figuring out the main differences between GR and related countries.

Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 148
Author(s):  
Mahdi Hashemi

Disinformation campaigns on online social networks (OSNs) in recent years have underscored democracy’s vulnerability to such operations and the importance of identifying such operations and dissecting their methods, intents, and source. This paper is another milestone in a line of research on political disinformation, propaganda, and extremism on OSNs. A total of 40,000 original Tweets (not re-Tweets or Replies) related to the U.S. 2020 presidential election are collected. The intent, focus, and political affiliation of these political Tweets are determined through multiple discussions and revisions. There are three political affiliations: rightist, leftist, and neutral. A total of 171 different classes of intent or focus are defined for Tweets. A total of 25% of Tweets were left out while defining these classes of intent. The purpose is to assure that the defined classes would be able to cover the intent and focus of unseen Tweets (Tweets that were not used to determine and define these classes) and no new classes would be required. This paper provides these classes, their definition and size, and example Tweets from them. If any information is included in a Tweet, its factuality is verified through valid news sources and articles. If any opinion is included in a Tweet, it is determined that whether or not it is extreme, through multiple discussions and revisions. This paper provides analytics with regard to the political affiliation and intent of Tweets. The results show that disinformation and extreme opinions are more common among rightists Tweets than leftist Tweets. Additionally, Coronavirus pandemic is the topic of almost half of the Tweets, where 25.43% of Tweets express their unhappiness with how Republicans have handled this pandemic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
C S Pavan Kumar ◽  
L D Dhinesh Babu

Sentiment analysis is widely used to retrieve the hidden sentiments in medical discussions over Online Social Networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. People often tend to convey their feelings concerning their medical problems over social media platforms. Practitioners and health care workers have started to observe these discussions to assess the impact of health-related issues among the people. This helps in providing better care to improve the quality of life. Dementia is a serious disease in western countries like the United States of America and the United Kingdom, and the respective governments are providing facilities to the affected people. There is much chatter over social media platforms concerning the patients’ care, healthy measures to be followed to avoid disease, check early indications. These chatters have to be carefully monitored to help the officials take necessary precautions for the betterment of the affected. A novel Feature engineering architecture that involves feature-split for sentiment analysis of medical chatter over online social networks with the pipeline is proposed that can be used on any Machine Learning model. The proposed model used the fuzzy membership function in refining the outputs. The machine learning model has obtained sentiment score is subjected to fuzzification and defuzzification by using the trapezoid membership function and center of sums method, respectively. Three datasets are considered for comparison of the proposed and the regular model. The proposed approach delivered better results than the normal approach and is proved to be an effective approach for sentiment analysis of medical discussions over online social networks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanveer Ahmed Siddiqi ◽  
Saima Ashraf ◽  
Sadiq Ali Khan ◽  
Muhammad Jawed Iqbal

Author(s):  
Abhishek Vaish ◽  
Rajiv Krishna G. ◽  
Akshay Saxena ◽  
Dharmaprakash M. ◽  
Utkarsh Goel

The aim of this research is to propose a model through which the viral nature of an information item in an online social network can be quantified. Further, the authors propose an alternate technique for information asset valuation by accommodating virality in it which not only complements the existing valuation system, but also improves the accuracy of the results. They use a popularly available YouTube dataset to collect attributes and measure critical factors such as share-count, appreciation, user rating, controversiality, and comment rate. These variables are used with a proposed formula to obtain viral index of each video on a given date. The authors then identify a conventional and a hybrid asset valuation technique to demonstrate how virality can fit in to provide accurate results.The research demonstrates the dependency of virality on critical social network factors. With the help of a second dataset acquired, the authors determine the pattern virality of an information item takes over time.


Author(s):  
Malik Magdon-Ismail

AbstractWe present a robust data-driven machine learning analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic from its early infection dynamics, specifically infection counts over time. The goal is to extract actionable public health insights. These insights include the infectious force, the rate of a mild infection becoming serious, estimates for asymtomatic infections and predictions of new infections over time. We focus on USA data starting from the first confirmed infection on January 20 2020. Our methods reveal significant asymptomatic (hidden) infection, a lag of about 10 days, and we quantitatively confirm that the infectious force is strong with about a 0.14% transition from mild to serious infection. Our methods are efficient, robust and general, being agnostic to the specific virus and applicable to different populations or cohorts.


Author(s):  
Antônio Diogo Forte Martins ◽  
José Maria Monteiro ◽  
Javam Machado

During the coronavirus pandemic, the problem of misinformation arose once again, quite intensely, through social networks. In Brazil, one of the primary sources of misinformation is the messaging application WhatsApp. However, due to WhatsApp's private messaging nature, there still few methods of misinformation detection developed specifically for this platform. In this context, the automatic misinformation detection (MID) about COVID-19 in Brazilian Portuguese WhatsApp messages becomes a crucial challenge. In this work, we present the COVID-19.BR, a data set of WhatsApp messages about coronavirus in Brazilian Portuguese, collected from Brazilian public groups and manually labeled. Then, we are investigating different machine learning methods in order to build an efficient MID for WhatsApp messages. So far, our best result achieved an F1 score of 0.774 due to the predominance of short texts. However, when texts with less than 50 words are filtered, the F1 score rises to 0.85.


Author(s):  
Fahd Kalloubi ◽  
El Habib Nfaoui

Twitter is one of the primary online social networks where users share messages and contents of interest to those who follow their activities. To effectively categorize and give audience to their tweets, users try to append appropriate hashtags to their short messages. However, the hashtags usage is very small and very heterogeneous and users may spend a lot of time searching the appropriate hashtags. Thus, the need for a system to assist users in this task is very important to increase and homogenize the hashtagging usage. In this chapter, the authors present a hashtag recommendation system on microblogging platforms by leveraging semantic features. Furthermore, they conduct a detailed study on how the semantic-based model influences the final recommended hashtags using different ranking strategies. Moreover, they propose a linear and a machine learning based combination of these ranking strategies. The experiment results show that their approach improves content-based recommendations, achieving a recall of more than 47% on recommending 5 hashtags.


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