ABSTRACT
Differing opinions about COVID-19 have led to various online discourses regarding vaccines. Due to the detrimental effects and the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, detecting vaccine stance has become especially important and is attracting increasing attention. Communication during the pandemic is typically done via online and offline sources, which provide two complementary avenues for detecting vaccine stance. Therefore, this paper aims to (1) study the importance of integrating online and offline data to vaccine stance detection; and (2) identify the critical online and offline attributes that influence an individual's vaccine stance. We model vaccine hesitancy as a surrogate for identifying the importance of online and offline factors. With the aid of explainable AI and combinatorial analysis, we conclude that both online and offline factors help predict vaccine stance.
Subject(s)
COVID-19ABSTRACT
Despite the astonishing success of COVID-19 vaccines against the virus, a substantial proportion of the population is still hesitant to be vaccinated, undermining governmental efforts to control the virus. To address this problem, we need to understand the different factors giving rise to such a behavior, including social media discourses, news media propaganda, government responses, demographic and socioeconomic statuses, and COVID-19 statistics, etc. However, existing datasets fail to cover all these aspects, making it difficult to form a complete picture in inferencing about the problem of vaccine hesitancy. In this paper, we construct a multi-source, multi-modal, and multi-feature online-offline data repository CoVaxNet. We provide descriptive analyses and insights to illustrate critical patterns in CoVaxNet. Moreover, we propose a novel approach for connecting online and offline data so as to facilitate the inference tasks that exploit complementary information sources.