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Identifying Multi-dimensional Information from Microblogs During Epidemics

Published: 03 January 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Microblogging sites like Twitter and Weibo have been shown to provide important real-time information during epidemics and disease outbreaks. During such situations, different types of stakeholders look for different types of information, such as symptoms, prevention, treatment schemes, death reports, and many more. Additionally, lots of personal opinions, sentiments are also posted on social media along with factual contents. In this work, we propose a method to automatically classify tweets posted during an epidemic into various informative categories. To this end, we utilize features derived from a medical knowledge base (UMLS) as well as features based on syntactic and lexical structure of tweets. We apply the classifier over tweets related to several diseases (Ebola, Dengue, and MERS), and show that, the proposed approach yields better classification performance as compared to earlier works. We also identify some interesting directions of future work, e.g., applying the classifier over drug addictions like Opioid.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)When Infodemic Meets Epidemic: Systematic Literature ReviewJMIR Public Health and Surveillance10.2196/5564211(e55642)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2025
  • (2024)A Trustworthy Approach to Classify and Analyze Epidemic-Related Information From MicroblogsIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2024.339139511:5(6229-6241)Online publication date: Oct-2024
  • (2024)Let’s explain crisis: deep multi-scale hierarchical attention framework for crisis-task identificationThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-024-06150-580:12(17923-17951)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
CODS-COMAD '19: Proceedings of the ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data
January 2019
380 pages
ISBN:9781450362078
DOI:10.1145/3297001
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 03 January 2019

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  • Research-article
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CoDS-COMAD '19
CoDS-COMAD '19: 6th ACM IKDD CoDS and 24th COMAD
January 3 - 5, 2019
Kolkata, India

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CODS-COMAD '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 62 of 198 submissions, 31%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 197 of 680 submissions, 29%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)When Infodemic Meets Epidemic: Systematic Literature ReviewJMIR Public Health and Surveillance10.2196/5564211(e55642)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2025
  • (2024)A Trustworthy Approach to Classify and Analyze Epidemic-Related Information From MicroblogsIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2024.339139511:5(6229-6241)Online publication date: Oct-2024
  • (2024)Let’s explain crisis: deep multi-scale hierarchical attention framework for crisis-task identificationThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-024-06150-580:12(17923-17951)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2022)Multi-task Models for Multi-faceted Classification of Pandemic Information on Social MediaProceedings of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference 202210.1145/3501247.3531552(327-335)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2022
  • (2021)Dense Vector Embedding Based Approach to Identify Prominent Disseminators From Twitter Data Amid COVID-19 OutbreakIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence10.1109/TETCI.2021.30676615:3(308-320)Online publication date: Jun-2021
  • (2020)Learning from Tweets: Opportunities and Challenges to Inform Policy Making During Dengue EpidemicProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33928754:CSCW1(1-27)Online publication date: 29-May-2020

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