Large-scale, Language-agnostic Discourse Classification of Tweets During COVID-19

Quantifying the characteristics of public attention is an essential prerequisite for appropriate crisis management during severe events such as pandemics. For this purpose, we propose language-agnostic tweet representations to perform large-scale Twitter discourse classification with machine learning. Our analysis on more than 26 million COVID-19 tweets shows that large-scale surveillance of public discourse is feasible with computationally lightweight classifiers by out-of-the-box utilization of these representations.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Understanding the Roots of Radicalisation on Twitter

In an increasingly digital world, identifying signs of online extremism sits at the top of the priority list for counter-extremist agencies. Researchers and governments are investing in the creation of advanced information technologies to identify and counter extremism through intelligent large-scale analysis of online data. However, to the best of our knowledge, these technologies are neither based on, nor do they take advantage of, the existing theories and studies of radicalisation. In this paper we propose a computational approach for detecting and predicting the radicalisation influence a user is exposed to, grounded on the notion of ’roots of radicalisation’ from social science models. This approach has been applied to analyse and compare the radicalisation level of 112 pro-ISIS vs.112 “general" Twitter users. Our results show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms in detecting and predicting radicalisation influence, obtaining up to 0.9 F-1 measure for detection and between 0.7 and 0.8 precision for prediction. While this is an initial attempt towards the effective combination of social and computational perspectives, more work is needed to bridge these disciplines, and to build on their strengths to target the problem of online radicalisation

Sentiment Analysis on Twitters Big Data Against the Covid- 19 Pandemic Using Machine Learning Algorithms

This paper analyzes users reactions on Twitter to the COVID-19 pandemic, using machine learning and data mining algorithms to classify tweets according to economic and health fears. A large dataset of tweets is explored, extracted, transformed, loaded, cleansed, and analyzed. The proposed framework improves prediction quality with a proposed dictionary that is used to classify tweets. The study compares four supervised machine learning algorithms and finds that people discuss the pandemics dangers from economic and health perspectives with equal frequency. The Naive Bayes algorithm achieves the highest percentage of correct predictions

Sentiment Analysis on Social Distancing and Physical Distancing on Twitter Social Media using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) Algorithm

The government is seeking preventive steps to reduce the risk of the spread of Covid-19, one of which is social restrictions that have become popular with social distancing and physical distancing. One way to assess whether the steps taken by the government regarding social and physical distancing are accepted or not by the community is by conducting sentiment analysis. The process of sentiment analysis is carried out using a variant of the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), namely Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). In this study, the results obtained from the sentiment analysis, where the public response to social distancing and physical distancing has more positive sentiments than negative sentiments. To measure the accuracy level of sentiment analysis using the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) algorithm and evaluation of the modeling is done using confusion matrix where the results obtained for the training dataset are 89% accuracy, 89% recall, 89% precision, and 89% F1 Score. Meanwhile, for the test dataset, an accuracy of 80% was obtained, a recall of 79%, a precision of 81%, and an F1 score of 80%

Data-driven Computational Social Science: A Survey

Social science concerns issues on individuals, relationships, and the whole society. The complexity of research topics in social science makes it the amalgamation of multiple disciplines, such as economics, political science, and sociology, etc. For centuries, scientists have conducted many studies to understand the mechanisms of the society. However, due to the limitations of traditional research methods, there exist many critical social issues to be explored. To solve those issues, computational social science emerges due to the rapid advancements of computation technologies and the profound studies on social science. With the aids of the advanced research techniques, various kinds of data from diverse areas can be acquired nowadays, and they can help us look into social problems with a new eye. As a result, utilizing various data to reveal issues derived from computational social science area has attracted more and more attentions. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we present a survey on data-driven computational social science for the first time which primarily focuses on reviewing application domains involving human dynamics. The state-of-the-art research on human dynamics is reviewed from three aspects: individuals, relationships, and collectives. Specifically, the research methodologies used to address research challenges in aforementioned application domains are summarized. In addition, some important open challenges with respect to both emerging research topics and research methods are discussed.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure