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A comparison and analysis of the Twitter discourse related to weight loss and fitness

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Abstract

More than 30% of the world population is concerned with the problem of overweight. Social media can play a role in human health by offering them correct food patterns and increasing their awareness about different features of appropriate food and diet. Several researches have been carried out on context analysis of social network messages, but there is a paucity of literature on analysis of feelings in tweets and their different geographical locations. This study aims at understanding tweets stated on the amount of reception shown by people in the course of weight loss in a period of 1 month. This study uses cross-sectional and descriptive method to analyze over 2,684,858 of tweets quantitatively. It also compares the emotional aspects present in the tweets. Users, who are active in this domain, are classified into six classes. An investigation and comparison of the number of activities with relation to weight loss has been carried out by searching users’ geographical information of social networks in different continents. English tweets have been chosen because of the generality of the English language. After reviewing the previous literature and the results of the analysis on these tweets, using the MALLET software, six classifications were considered for the tweets. The results show that there is a meaningful relation among the extracted parameters in the research.

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Aknowledgement

This paper derives from the Research Project with code 98-1-37-14862 and Approval ID IR.IUMS.REC.1398.308.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Mashhad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran

    Shabnam Shadroo

  2. Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran

    Mohsen Yoosefi Nejad

  3. Diplomacy and Public Relations Department, University of Human Development, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq

    Ahmed Omar Bali

  4. Health Management and Economics Research Center, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    Mehdi Hosseinzadeh

  5. Department of Computer Engineering, Sabzevar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Sabzevar, Iran

    Maryam sadat Delghandi

Authors
  1. Shabnam Shadroo
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  2. Mohsen Yoosefi Nejad
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  3. Ahmed Omar Bali
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  4. Mehdi Hosseinzadeh
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  5. Maryam sadat Delghandi
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Contributions

MY studied conception and design, data collection, drafting of manuscript, drafting of manuscript, analysis and interpretation of data, and writing the article. MH participated in study conception and design, analysis and interpretation of data, final approval of article. MD participated in analysis and interpretation of data, writing the article, and final approval of article.

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Correspondence to Mehdi Hosseinzadeh.

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Shadroo, S., Yoosefi Nejad, M., Bali, A.O. et al. A comparison and analysis of the Twitter discourse related to weight loss and fitness. Netw Model Anal Health Inform Bioinforma 9, 23 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13721-020-00228-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13721-020-00228-9

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