Exploring Opinions and Concerns about the Human Papillomavirus Vaccine on a United Kingdom Online Discussion Forum

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Can online self-reports assist in real-time identification of influenza vaccination uptake? A cross-sectional study of influenza vaccine-related tweets in the USA, 2013-2017

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spend significant time and resources to track influenza vaccination coverage each influenza season using national surveys. Emerging data from social media provide an alternative solution to surveillance at both national and local levels of influenza vaccination coverage in near real time. This study aimed to characterise and analyse the vaccinated population from temporal, demographical and geographical perspectives using automatic classification of vaccination-related Twitter data. In this cross-sectional study, we continuously collected tweets containing both influenza-related terms and vaccine-related terms covering four consecutive influenza seasons from 2013 to 2017. We created a machine learning classifier to identify relevant tweets, then evaluated the approach by comparing to data from the CDC's FluVaxView. We limited our analysis to tweets geolocated within the USA. We assessed 1 124 839 tweets. We found strong correlations of 0.799 between monthly Twitter estimates and CDC, with correlations as high as 0.950 in individual influenza seasons. We also found that our approach obtained geographical correlations of 0.387 at the US state level and 0.467 at the regional level. Finally, we found a higher level of influenza vaccine tweets among female users than male users, also consistent with the results of CDC surveys on vaccine uptake. Significant correlations between Twitter data and CDC data show the potential of using social media for vaccination surveillance. Temporal variability is captured better than geographical and demographical variability. We discuss potential paths forward for leveraging this approach.</p

It's Not All About Autism: the Emerging Landscape of Anti-Vaccination Sentiment on Facebook

Introduction: The anti-vaccination movement has been present since the early 1700s. Previous research suggests that social media may be fueling the spread of anti-vaccination messaging. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to (1) highlight major events in the history of the anti-vaccine movement, (2) present a stand-alone journal article from a systematic analysis of individuals known to express anti-vaccination sentiment on Facebook, and (3) integrate the conclusions presented in the article into a broader historical framework. Methods: A literature review was conducted for the historical overview. For the journal article, our data set consisted of 197 individuals with Facebook accounts who posted anti-vaccination comments on a prominent local pediatric clinic’s Facebook page. For each individual, we systematically analyzed publicly available content using quantitative coding, descriptive analysis, social network analysis, and an in-depth qualitative assessment. Results: Throughout history, the anti-vaccination movement has consistently sued fiery rhetoric and vivid imagery to spread its messages, which often center on concerns of liberty and safety. Analysis of Facebook profiles found that more individuals posted content related to mistrust in the medical community, liberty, and belief in homeopathic remedies compared to those who posted that vaccines cause autism. Among 136 individuals who divulged their location, 36 states and 8 countries outside the U.S. were represented. In a 2-mode network of individuals and topics, modularity analysis revealed 4 distinct sub-groups: (1) liberty, (2) naturalness, (3) illness, and (4) conspiracy. Qualitative analysis found that individuals often share posts from Facebook groups that market themselves as pro-science. Conclusion: Individuals on Facebook frequently posted anti-vaccine content that echoed historical concerns. Our findings suggest social media outlets facilitate anti-vaccination connection and organization, thus assisting in the amplification and diffusion of centuries’ old arguments and techniques. These findings are significant for public health in that they will inform the development of updated messaging around vaccination, and suggest the importance of understanding the history of the anti-vaccination movement when developing these messages. These findings also suggest a valuable opportunity for public health practitioners to leverage social networks to deliver more effective, tailored interventions to different constituencies

VaxInsight: an artificial intelligence system to access large-scale public perceptions of vaccination from social media

Vaccination is considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. A high vaccination rate is required to reduce the prevalence and incidence of vaccine-preventable diseases. However, in the last two decades, there has been a significant and increasing number of people who refuse or delay getting vaccinated and who prohibit their children from receiving vaccinations. Importantly, under-vaccination is associated with infectious disease outbreaks. A good understanding of public perceptions regarding vaccinations is important if we are to develop effective vaccination promotion strategies. Traditional methods of research, such as surveys, suffer limitations that impede our understanding of public perceptions, including resources cost, delays in data collection and analysis, especially in large samples. The popularity of social media (e.g. Twitter), combined with advances in artificial intelligence algorithms (e.g. natural language processing, deep learning), open up new avenues for accessing large scale data on public perceptions related to vaccinations. This dissertation reports on an original and systematic effort to develop artificial intelligence algorithms that will increase our ability to use Twitter discussions to understand vaccine-related perceptions and intentions. The research is framed within the perspectives offered by grounded behavior change theories. Tweets concerning the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine were used to accomplish three major aims: 1) Develop a deep learning-based system to better understand public perceptions of the HPV vaccine, using Twitter data and behavior change theories; 2) Develop a deep learning-based system to infer Twitter users’ demographic characteristics (e.g. gender and home location) and investigate demographic differences in public perceptions of the HPV vaccine; 3) Develop a web-based interactive visualization system to monitor real-time Twitter discussions of the HPV vaccine. For Aim 1, the bi-directional long short-term memory (LSTM) network with attention mechanism outperformed traditional machine learning and competitive deep learning algorithms in mapping Twitter discussions to the theoretical constructs of behavior change theories. Domain-specific embedding trained on HPV vaccine-related Twitter corpus by fastText algorithms further improved performance on some tasks. Time series analyses revealed evolving trends of public perceptions regarding the HPV vaccine. For Aim 2, the character-based convolutional neural network model achieved favorable state-of-the-art performance in Twitter gender inference on a Public Author Profiling challenge. The trained models then were applied to the Twitter corpus and they identified gender differences in public perceptions of the HPV vaccine. The findings on gender differences were largely consistent with previous survey-based studies. For the Twitter users’ home location inference, geo-tagging was framed as text classification tasks that resulted in a character-based recurrent neural network model. The model outperformed machine learning and deep learning baselines on home location tagging. Interstate variations in public perceptions of the HPV vaccine also were identified. For Aim 3, a prototype web-based interactive dashboard, VaxInsight, was built to synthesize HPV vaccine-related Twitter discussions in a comprehendible format. The usability test of VaxInsight showed high usability of the system. Notably, this maybe the first study to use deep learning algorithms to understand Twitter discussions of the HPV vaccine within the perspective of grounded behavior change theories. VaxInsight is also the first system that allows users to explore public health beliefs of vaccine related topics from Twitter. Thus, the present research makes original and systematical contributions to medical informatics by combining cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms and grounded behavior change theories. This work also builds a foundation for the next generation of real-time public health surveillance and research

Leveraging machine learning-based approaches to assess human papillomavirus vaccination sentiment trends with Twitter data

Abstract Background As one of the serious public health issues, vaccination refusal has been attracting more and more attention, especially for newly approved human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines. Understanding public opinion towards HPV vaccines, especially concerns on social media, is of significant importance for HPV vaccination promotion. Methods In this study, we leveraged a hierarchical machine learning based sentiment analysis system to extract public opinions towards HPV vaccines from Twitter. English tweets containing HPV vaccines-related keywords were collected from November 2, 2015 to March 28, 2016. Manual annotation was done to evaluate the performance of the system on the unannotated tweets corpus. Followed time series analysis was applied to this corpus to track the trends of machine-deduced sentiments and their associations with different days of the week. Results The evaluation of the unannotated tweets corpus showed that the micro-averaging F scores have reached 0.786. The learning system deduced the sentiment labels for 184,214 tweets in the collected unannotated tweets corpus. Time series analysis identified a coincidence between mainstream outcome and Twitter contents. A weak trend was found for “Negative” tweets that decreased firstly and began to increase later; an opposite trend was identified for “Positive” tweets. Tweets that contain the worries on efficacy for HPV vaccines showed a relative significant decreasing trend. Strong associations were found between some sentiments (“Positive”, “Negative”, “Negative-Safety” and “Negative-Others”) with different days of the week. Conclusions Our efforts on sentiment analysis for newly approved HPV vaccines provide us an automatic and instant way to extract public opinion and understand the concerns on Twitter. Our approaches can provide a feedback to public health professionals to monitor online public response, examine the effectiveness of their HPV vaccination promotion strategies and adjust their promotion plans

Additional file 2: Table S2. of Leveraging machine learning-based approaches to assess human papillomavirus vaccination sentiment trends with Twitter data

Sample tweets predicated by the machine learning system. URLs and Twitter user names have been removed. (DOC 30 kb

Additional file 1: Table S1. of Leveraging machine learning-based approaches to assess human papillomavirus vaccination sentiment trends with Twitter data

Detailed definitions of different sentiment categories for HPV vaccine related tweets. (DOC 30 kb

Método semi-supervisado para detectar, clasificar y anotar en un corpus de suicidio textos extraídos de entornos digitales

La presente tesis doctoral, con un enfoque cualicuantitativo (mixto), se enmarca en la línea del análisis de sentimientos en redes sociales, forma parte del proyecto Life, que busca crear una plataforma integral para detectar y brindar apoyo especializado a usuarios de redes sociales que publican textos con contenido suicida. Por ello se desarrolló el Corpus Life para realizar experimentos con algoritmos de aprendizaje automático, mismo que originalmente constaba de 102 mensajes suicidas (71 textos en inglés y 31 textos en español), 70 de estas muestras Sin Riesgo y 32 con Riesgo. Pero debido al escaso número de muestras y al desbalance entre ellas, los resultados generados no eran confiables. Por ello esta investigación tuvo como objetivo general desarrollar un método semi-supervisado para detectar, clasificar y anotar en el Corpus Life, textos extraídos de entornos digitales, con el fin de incrementar su número de anotaciones, mediante un proceso de evaluación automática de su calidad, previo a su inclusión o exclusión. Anotaciones que fueron evaluadas manualmente, utilizando para ello la medida de concordancia Cohen´s Kappa, con la participación de anotadores especializados quienes evaluaron los textos, alcanzando un nivel de acuerdo entre anotadores de 0,86, cercano al 0,78-0,81 de significancia estadística alcanzado automáticamente por medio del índice macro f1, con el método semi-supervisado. Lo que conllevo a alcanzar experimentos de un mayor grado de confiabilidad, por medio de un método estructurado con actividades, roles y procesos bien definidos y enlazados.This doctoral thesis with a qualitative-quantitative (mixed) approach is part of the analysis of feelings in social networks that publish texts with suicidal content. For this reason, Corpus life was developed to carry out experiments with machine learning algorithms, which originally consisted of 102 suicide messages (71 texts in English and 31 texts in Spanish), 70 of these samples without risk and 32 with risk. But due to the small number of samples and the imbalance between them, the generated outcome was not reliable. Therefore, this research had the general objective of developing a semi-supervised method to detect, classify and annotate in the Corpus Life, texts extracted from digital environments, in order to increase their number of annotations, through a process of automatic assessments of their quality, prior to their inclusion or exclusion. Records which were tested manually, using the Cohen's Kappa concordance measure, with the participation of specialized annotators who evaluated the texts, reaching a level of agreement between annotators of 0.86, close to 0.78-0.81 of statistically significant reaching automatically by means of the f1 macro index, with the semi-supervised method. This led to achieving experiments with a higher degree of reliability, through a structured method with well-defined and linked activities, roles and processes