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Analyzing Public Outlook towards Vaccination using Twitter
Proceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019
  • Rutuja Mahajan, Wright State University - Main Campus
  • William Romine, Wright State University - Main Campus
  • Michele Miller, Wright State University - Main Campus
  • Tanvi Banerjee, Wright State University - Main Campus
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
12-1-2019
Disciplines
Abstract

© 2019 IEEE. Educational programs about vaccination tend to target vaccine acceptance and reduction of hesitancy. Social media provides a promising platform for studying public perception regarding vaccination. In this study, we harvested tweets over a year related to vaccines from February 2018 to January 2019. We present a two-stage classifier to: (1) classify the tweets as relevant or non-relevant and (2) categorize them in terms of pro-vaccination, anti-vaccination, or neutral outlooks. We found that the classifier was able to distinguish clearly between antivaccination and pro-vaccination tweets, but also misclassified many of these as neutral. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we found that two topics were sufficient to describe the corpus of tweets. These dealt with: (1) consequences of vaccination/non- vaccination, and (2) promotion of vaccination/non-vaccination. Finally, using the NRC emotion lexicon, we found practically significant differences in emotions expressed about vaccination between vaccine outlooks, but no practically significant temporal differences by month across a year.

DOI
10.1109/BigData47090.2019.9006136
Citation Information
Rutuja Mahajan, William Romine, Michele Miller and Tanvi Banerjee. "Analyzing Public Outlook towards Vaccination using Twitter" Proceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019 (2019) p. 2763 - 2772
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tanvi-banerjee/40/