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Article
Leveraging Natural Language Processing to Understand Public Outlook Towards the Influenza Vaccination
2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)
  • Ankita Agarwal, Wright State University - Main Campus
  • William Romine, Wright State University - Main Campus
  • Tanvi Banerjee, Wright State University - Main Campus
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-19-2021
Identifier/URL
136361439 (Orcid)
Disciplines
Abstract

Understanding public outlook in healthcare management is important in the study of the various diseases. With respect to vaccinations, which play a major role in combating vaccine-preventable diseases, the study on their acceptance or rejection by the public becomes useful. In particular to the influenza vaccine, studies on the public opinion and views is ongoing. Social media platforms like Twitter help us to leverage thoughts and attitudes related to the flu vaccine. The data set used for our analysis contained tweets related to vaccines which were collected using vaccine-related keywords over a period of twelve months from February, 2018 to January, 2019. Out of these tweets, we filtered out the tweets specific to the flu vaccine and generated our corpus for further study. By using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we identified eighteen topics comprising six major themes which best represented our corpus. In this paper, we discuss these six themes and subsequently analyze the trend observed in these themes over a period of twelve months. The themes identified covered various aspects related to the flu vaccine. Among the six major themes, four showed a distinctive temporal trend with respect to the annual flu season.

DOI
10.1109/BigData50022.2020.9378075
Citation Information
Ankita Agarwal, William Romine and Tanvi Banerjee. "Leveraging Natural Language Processing to Understand Public Outlook Towards the Influenza Vaccination" 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data) (2021) p. 4981 - 4987 ISSN: 978-1-7281-6251-5
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tanvi-banerjee/88/