Detecting Mental Distresses Using Social Behavior Analysis in the Context of COVID-19: A Survey

Online social media provides a channel for monitoring people\u27s social behaviors from which to infer and detect their mental distresses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, online social networks were increasingly used to express opinions, views, and moods due to the restrictions on physical activities and in-person meetings, leading to a significant amount of diverse user-generated social media content. This offers a unique opportunity to examine how COVID-19 changed global behaviors regarding its ramifications on mental well-being. In this article, we surveyed the literature on social media analysis for the detection of mental distress, with a special emphasis on the studies published since the COVID-19 outbreak. We analyze relevant research and its characteristics and propose new approaches to organizing the large amount of studies arising from this emerging research area, thus drawing new views, insights, and knowledge for interested communities. Specifically, we first classify the studies in terms of feature extraction types, language usage patterns, aesthetic preferences, and online behaviors. We then explored various methods (including machine learning and deep learning techniques) for detecting mental health problems. Building upon the in-depth review, we present our findings and discuss future research directions and niche areas in detecting mental health problems using social media data. We also elaborate on the challenges of this fast-growing research area, such as technical issues in deploying such systems at scale as well as privacy and ethical concerns

Proposed Hybrid model for Sentiment Classification using CovNet-DualLSTM Techniques

The fast growth of Internet and social media has resulted in a significant quantity of texts based review that is posted on the platforms like social media. In the age of social media, analyzing the emotional context of comments using machine learning technology helps in understanding of QoS for any product or service. Analysis and classification of user's review helps in improving the QoS (Quality of Services). Machine Learning techniques have evolved as a great tool for performing sentiment analysis of user's. In contrast to traditional classification models. Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) has obtained substantial outcomes and Convolution Neural Network (CNN) has shown promising outcomes in sentiment classification. CNN can successfully retrieve local information by utilizing convolutions and pooling layers. BiLSTM employs dual LSTM orientations for increasing the background knowledge accessible to deep learning based models. The hybrid model proposed here is to utilize the advantages of these two deep learning based models. Tweets of users for reviews of Indian Railway Services have been used as data source for analysis and classification. Keras Embedding technique is used as input source to the proposed hybrid model. The proposed model receives inputs and generates features with lower dimensions which generate a classification result. The performance of proposed hybrid model was compared using Keras and Word2Vec and observed effective improvement in the response of the proposed model with an accuracy of 95.19%

Mapping (Dis-)Information Flow about the MH17 Plane Crash

Digital media enables not only fast sharing of information, but also disinformation. One prominent case of an event leading to circulation of disinformation on social media is the MH17 plane crash. Studies analysing the spread of information about this event on Twitter have focused on small, manually annotated datasets, or used proxys for data annotation. In this work, we examine to what extent text classifiers can be used to label data for subsequent content analysis, in particular we focus on predicting pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian Twitter content related to the MH17 plane crash. Even though we find that a neural classifier improves over a hashtag based baseline, labeling pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian content with high precision remains a challenging problem. We provide an error analysis underlining the difficulty of the task and identify factors that might help improve classification in future work. Finally, we show how the classifier can facilitate the annotation task for human annotators

Fine-grained Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Based on Gating and Attention Mechanism

In recent years, more and more people express their feelings through both images and texts, boosting the growth of multimodal data. Multimodal data contains richer semantics and is more conducive to judging the real emotions of people. To fully learn the features of every single modality and integrate modal information, this paper proposes a fine-grained multimodal sentiment analysis method FCLAG based on gating and attention mechanism. First, the method is carried out from the character level and the word level in the text aspect. CNN is used to extract more fine-grained emotional information from characters, and the attention mechanism is used to improve the expressiveness of the keywords. In terms of images, a gating mechanism is added to control the flow of image information between networks. The images and text vectors represent the original data collectively. Then the bidirectional LSTM is used to complete further learning, which enhances the information interaction capability between the modalities. Finally, put the multimodal feature expression into the classifier. This method is verified on a self-built image and text dataset. The experimental results show that compared with other sentiment classification models, this method has greater improvement in accuracy and F1 score and it can effectively improve the performance of multimodal sentiment analysis

“Comments Matter and The More The Better!”: Improving Rumor Detection with User Comments

While many online platforms bring great benefits to their users by allowing user-generated content, they have also facilitated generation and spreading of harmful content such as rumors. Researcher have proposed different rumor detection methods based on features extracted from the original post and/or associated comments, but how comments affect the performance of such methods remains largely less understood. In this paper, we first propose a new BERT-based rumor detection method that can outperform other state-of-the-art methods, and then used it to study the role of comments in rumor detection. Our proposed method concatenates the original post and associated comments to form a single long text, which is then segmented into shorter chunks more suitable for BERT-based vectorization. Features extracted from all trunks are fed into a classifier based on an LSTM network or a transformer layer for the classification task. The experimental results on the PHEME and Ma-Weibo datasets proved the superior performance of our method. We conducted additional experiments on different settings of our proposed method to study different aspects of the role comments play in the rumor detection task. These additional experiments led to some very interesting findings, including the surprising result that fixed-length segmentation is better than natural segmentation, and the observation that including more comments can help improve the rumor detector's performance. Some of these findings have profound operational implications for online platforms, e.g., commentators can contribute to rumor detection positively so online platforms can leverage the crowd intelligence to detect online rumors more effectively without applying over-strict content consensus policies