Three dimensions of COVID-19 risk perceptions and their socioeconomic correlates in the United States: A social media analysis.

Social media analysis provides an alternate approach to monitoring and understanding risk perceptions regarding COVID-19 over time. Our current understandings of risk perceptions regarding COVID-19 do not disentangle the three dimensions of risk perceptions (perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, and negative emotion) as the pandemic has evolved. Data are also limited regarding the impact of social determinants of health (SDOH) on COVID-19-related risk perceptions over time. To address these knowledge gaps, we extracted tweets regarding COVID-19-related risk perceptions and developed indicators for the three dimensions of risk perceptions based on over 502 million geotagged tweets posted by over 4.9 million Twitter users from January 2020 to December 2021 in the United States. We examined correlations between risk perception indicator scores and county-level SDOH. The three dimensions of risk perceptions demonstrate different trajectories. Perceived severity maintained a high level throughout the study period. Perceived susceptibility and negative emotion peaked on March 11, 2020 (COVID-19 declared global pandemic by WHO) and then declined and remained stable at lower levels until increasing once again with the Omicron period. Relative frequency of tweet posts on risk perceptions did not closely follow epidemic trends of COVID-19 (cases, deaths). Users from socioeconomically vulnerable counties showed lower attention to perceived severity and susceptibility of COVID-19 than those from wealthier counties. Examining trends in tweets regarding the multiple dimensions of risk perceptions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic can help policymakers frame in-time, tailored, and appropriate responses to prevent viral spread and encourage preventive behavior uptake in the United States.

Using Twitter-Based Data for Sexual Violence Research: Scoping Review.

BACKGROUND: Scholars have used data from in-person interviews, administrative systems, and surveys for sexual violence research. Using Twitter as a data source for examining the nature of sexual violence is a relatively new and underexplored area of study. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to perform a scoping review of the current literature on using Twitter data for researching sexual violence, elaborate on the validity of the methods, and discuss the implications and limitations of existing studies. METHODS: We performed a literature search in the following 6 databases: APA PsycInfo (Ovid), Scopus, PubMed, International Bibliography of Social Sciences (ProQuest), Criminal Justice Abstracts (EBSCO), and Communications Abstracts (EBSCO), in April 2022. The initial search identified 3759 articles that were imported into Covidence. Seven independent reviewers screened these articles following 2 steps: (1) title and abstract screening, and (2) full-text screening. The inclusion criteria were as follows: (1) empirical research, (2) focus on sexual violence, (3) analysis of Twitter data (ie, tweets or Twitter metadata), and (4) text in English. Finally, we selected 121 articles that met the inclusion criteria and coded these articles. RESULTS: We coded and presented the 121 articles using Twitter-based data for sexual violence research. About 70% (89/121, 73.6%) of the articles were published in peer-reviewed journals after 2018. The reviewed articles collectively analyzed about 79.6 million tweets. The primary approaches to using Twitter as a data source were content text analysis (112/121, 92.5%) and sentiment analysis (31/121, 25.6%). Hashtags (103/121, 85.1%) were the most prominent metadata feature, followed by tweet time and date, retweets, replies, URLs, and geotags. More than a third of the articles (51/121, 42.1%) used the application programming interface to collect Twitter data. Data analyses included qualitative thematic analysis, machine learning (eg, sentiment analysis, supervised machine learning, unsupervised machine learning, and social network analysis), and quantitative analysis. Only 10.7% (13/121) of the studies discussed ethical considerations. CONCLUSIONS: We described the current state of using Twitter data for sexual violence research, developed a new taxonomy describing Twitter as a data source, and evaluated the methodologies. Research recommendations include the following: development of methods for data collection and analysis, in-depth discussions about ethical norms, exploration of specific aspects of sexual violence on Twitter, examination of tweets in multiple languages, and decontextualization of Twitter data. This review demonstrates the potential of using Twitter data in sexual violence research.

Impact of COVID-19 on the Human Personality: An Analysis Based on Document Modeling Using Machine Learning Tools

Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) has affected the globe terribly. The rapid spread of this virus and the precautionary measures to prevent it have impacted the lives of all human beings around the world in all dimensions. The anxieties over the virus along with the social restrictions have challenged the mental health and might have acute psychological consequences. In this study, our aim is to analyze whether COVID-19 has done any significant changes to very well-known five-factor personality traits of all the humans all over the world from social media text, such as Twitter. We first train and validate five machine learning models on the benchmark essays dataset and then those models are tested on the preprocessed Twitter dataset, consisting of pre_covid and post_covid tweets. The novelty of this study is to analyze and establish the fact that in this short period of time, COVID-19 cannot make very significant changes in the human personality all over the world. We have compared the performances of five machine learning models and what we have found is that the result provided by one model is also justified by the other models. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Computer Journal is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Analyzing airlines stock price volatility during COVID‐19 pandemic through internet search data

Recent Coronavirus pandemic has prompted many regulations which are affecting the stock market. Especially because of lockdown policies across the world, the airlines industry is suffering. We analyse the stock price movements of three major airlines companies using a new approach which leverages a measure of internet concern on different topics. In this approach, Twitter data and Google Trends are used to create a set of predictors which then leads to an appropriately modified GARCH model. In the analysis, first we show that the ongoing pandemic has an unprecedented severe effect. Then, the proposed model is used to analyse and forecast stock price volatility of the airlines companies. The findings establish that our approach can successfully use the effects of internet concern for different topics on the movement of stock price index and provide good forecasting accuracy. Model confidence set (MCS) procedure further shows that the short‐term volatility forecasts are more accurate for this method than other candidate models. Thus, it can be used to understand the stock market during a pandemic in a better way. Further, the proposed approach is attractive and flexible, and can be extended to other related problems as well.

Don't Be a Victim during a Pandemic! Analysing Security and Privacy Threats in Twitter during COVID-19

There has been a huge spike in the usage of social media platforms during the COVID-19 lockdowns. These lockdown periods have resulted in a set of new cybercrimes, thereby allowing attackers to victimise social media users with a range of threats. This paper performs a large-scale study to investigate the impact of a pandemic and the lockdown periods on the security and privacy of social media users. We analyse 10.6 Million COVID-related tweets from 533 days of data crawling and investigate users' security and privacy behaviour in three different periods (i.e., before, during, and after the lockdown). Our study shows that users unintentionally share more personal identifiable information when writing about the pandemic situation (e.g., sharing nearby coronavirus testing locations) in their tweets. The privacy risk reaches 100% if a user posts three or more sensitive tweets about the pandemic. We investigate the number of suspicious domains shared on social media during different phases of the pandemic. Our analysis reveals an increase in the number of suspicious domains during the lockdown compared to other lockdown phases. We observe that IT, Search Engines, and Businesses are the top three categories that contain suspicious domains. Our analysis reveals that adversaries' strategies to instigate malicious activities change with the country's pandemic situation. © 2013 IEEE.

A Review on Twitter Data Sentiment Analysis Related to COVID-19

On March 11, 2020, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO, pronounced the outbreak a pandemic. The term "pandemic” refers to a disease that spreads rapidly and engulfs an entire geographic region. Coronavirus is a brand-new viral disease named after the year it first appeared. There is a scarcity of academic research on the subject to help researchers. Social media content analysis can reveal a lot concerning the general temperament and mood of the human race. In the field of sentiment analysis, deep learning models have been widely used. Sentiment analysis is a set of techniques, tools, and methods for detecting and extracting information. People have been using social networking sites like Twitter to voice their opinions, report realities, and provide a point of view on what is happening in the world today. Folks have always used Twitter to share data about the COVID-19 pandemic. People randomly share data visualizations from news revealed by organizations and the government. The numerous studies surveyed are selected based on a similarity. Every paper which is supervised performs sentiment analysis of Twitter data. Various studies have made used a fusion of diverse word embedding's with either machine learning classifiers or deep learning classifiers. Albeit the interpretation of single classifiers is satisfactory, the studies those proposed hybrid models have shown outstanding performance. On top of that transformer based models demonstrated quality results. It is concluded that using hybrid classifiers on Twitter data for sentiment analysis can surpass the achievements of the single classifiers. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

A user-oriented multi-input Sentiment Analysis and Feedback System for mental state awareness necessitated due to COVID-19

Development in technology has led to a spike in sharing of opinions about different subjects on social media, for instance, movie or product reviews. Unprecedented COVID-19 led to forced isolation and affected mental health negatively. This paper introduces a system to detect users' emotions and mental states based on provided input. Among the different data sources available on social media, real-time Twitter data is used in this analysis. Sentiment analysis can be used as a tool at various levels, right from individual to organizational development. Deep learning algorithms like LSTM and CNN lay the foundation of this system. Python libraries and Google APIs are used to add functionalities. Earlier studies only focused on detecting emotions, whereas the proposed system provides the user with a graphical analysis of detected emotions and apt suggestions like motivational quotes or videos. The system accepts multilingual text input, speech, or video input. The scope of this system is not restricted to COVID-19 related texts. This research will assist individuals and businesses and aid future development. © 2022 IEEE.

A Comparative Survey of Multimodal Multilabel Sentiment Analysis and Its Applications Initiated Due to the Impact of COVID-19

This study presents a detailed survey of different works related to sentiment analysis. The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on people's mental health act as the driving force behind this survey. The survey can help study sentiment analysis and approaches taken in many studies to detect human emotions via advanced technology. It can also help in improving present systems by finding loopholes and increasing their accuracy. Various lexicon and ML-based systems and models like Word2Vec and LSTM were studied in the surveyed papers. Some of the current and future directions highlighted were Twitter sentiment analysis, review-based market analysis, determining changing behavior and emotions in a given time period, and detecting the mental health of employees, and students. This survey provides details related to trends and topics in sentiment analysis and an in-depth understanding of various technologies used in different studies. It also gives an insight into the wide variety of applications related to sentiment analysis. © 2022 IEEE.

Optimal Machine Learning Driven Sentiment Analysis on COVID-19 Twitter Data

The outbreak of the pandemic, caused by Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), has affected the daily activities of people across the globe. During COVID-19 outbreak and the successive lockdowns, Twitter was heavily used and the number of tweets regarding COVID-19 increased tremendously. Several studies used Sentiment Analysis (SA) to analyze the emotions expressed through tweets upon COVID-19. Therefore, in current study, a new Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) with Machine Learning-driven SA (ABCML-SA) model is developed for conducting Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Twitter data. The prime focus of the presented ABCML-SA model is to recognize the sentiments expressed in tweets made upon COVID-19. It involves data pre-processing at the initial stage followed by n-gram based feature extraction to derive the feature vectors. For identification and classification of the sentiments, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) model is exploited. At last, the ABC algorithm is applied to fine tune the parameters involved in SVM. To demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed ABCML-SA model, a sequence of simulations was conducted. The comparative assessment results confirmed the effectual performance of the proposed ABCML-SA model over other approaches. © 2023 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.

Sigmoidal Particle Swarm Optimization for Twitter Sentiment Analysis

Social media, like Twitter, is a data repository, and people exchange views on global issues like the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media has been shown to influence the low acceptance of vaccines. This work aims to identify public sentiments concerning the COVID-19 vaccines and better understand the individual's sensitivities and feelings that lead to achievement. This work proposes a method to analyze the opinion of an individual's tweet about the COVID-19 vaccines. This paper introduces a sigmoidal particle swarm optimization (SPSO) algorithm. First, the performance of SPSO is measured on a set of 12 benchmark problems, and later it is deployed for selecting optimal text features and categorizing sentiment. The proposed method uses TextBlob and VADER for sentiment analysis, CountVectorizer, and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) vectorizer for feature extraction, followed by SPSO-based feature selection. The Covid-19 vaccination tweets dataset was created and used for training, validating, and testing. The proposed approach outperformed considered algorithms in terms of accuracy. Additionally, we augmented the newly created dataset to make it balanced to increase performance. A classical support vector machine (SVM) gives better accuracy for the augmented dataset without a feature selection algorithm. It shows that augmentation improves the overall accuracy of tweet analysis. After the augmentation performance of PSO and SPSO is improved by almost 7% and 5%, respectively, it is observed that simple SVM with 10-fold cross-validation significantly improved compared to the primary dataset. © 2023 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.

Reshuffling city life: spatial and functional dynamics of urban activity in Tokyo during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the measures to curb it have profoundly affected the geography of urban activities in the past years. In this paper, we discuss its effects on urban activity in Tokyo during the first wave of COVID between February and July 2020. Different from other papers, which have analysed general changes in urban activity levels or changes in specific activities, we have focused on changes in activity levels in different types of multifunctional urban activity centres (UAC), allowing us to reveal interactions between UAC types, (combinations of) activities and location within a wider urban system. Our results show how the distribution of urban activity across UAC changed in space and time in reaction to pandemic measures, and relate these dynamics to the spatial patterns of functional specialization of UAC. The existing spatial pattern of UAC allowed urban activities to redistribute spatially, but continue without too much inhibition. Moreover, these changes appeared to be temporary, rather than resulting in irreversible urban transformations. Our analysis thus suggests that Tokyo's multilayered polynuclear structure appeared to contribute to the city's pandemic resilience, allowing urban activities to spatially reorganize, without needing to resort to a total lockdown and collapse of urban life. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Distributed messaging and light streaming system for combating pandemics: A case study on spatial analysis of COVID-19 Geo-tagged Twitter dataset.

Real-time data processing and distributed messaging are problems that have been worked on for a long time. As the amount of spatial data being produced has increased, coupled with increasingly complex software solutions being developed, there is a need for platforms that address these needs. In this paper, we present a distributed and light streaming system for combating pandemics and give a case study on spatial analysis of the COVID-19 geo-tagged Twitter dataset. In this system, three of the major components are the translation of tweets matching with user-defined bounding boxes, name entity recognition in tweets, and skyline queries. Apache Pulsar addresses all these components in this paper. With the proposed system, end-users have the capability of getting COVID-19 related information within foreign regions, filtering/searching location, organization, person, and miscellaneous based tweets, and performing skyline based queries. The evaluation of the proposed system is done based on certain characteristics and performance metrics. The study differs greatly from other studies in terms of using distributed computing and big data technologies on spatial data to combat COVID-19. It is concluded that Pulsar is designed to handle large amounts of long-term on disk persistence.

Tracking Public Depression from Tweets on COVID-19 and Its Comparison with Pre-pandemic Time

Social media especially the Twitter platform has become a good data-source in Japan for tracking various social issues including depression and other mental health problems. It can overcome the under-representation and sampling bias of the survey data. In this study, we develop a machine learning approach to predict depression of Japanese people and compare their depression levels between pre-pandemic (2018) and pandemic (2020) times. We use three datasets in this study in which the first dataset is used for model development and its validation, while the rest two are used as test datasets for depression prediction. These two datasets represent timeseries tweets for the years 2018 (pre-pandemic) and 2020 (pandemic), respectively. After preprocessing the tweets, the Bag-of-words (BOW) feature is computed for each test dataset, which is later fed to the trained Logistic Regression (LOGR) model to classify tweets into "Depressive"and "Non-Depressive"categories. An analysis on the classified tweets shows a significant increase of depressive tweets in 2020, when compared with those in 2018. The covid related depressive tweets was found 50.37% of the total covid-related tweets and 8.6% of the total depressive tweets in the 2020 dataset, which indicates an increased impact of depression on the Japanese people due to COVID-19. Also, the peak depression occurs in June and August 2020 just after the first peak of the death progression timeseries in Japan, which indicates the consequences or shocks of exponential death-turmoil along with the increasing economic uncertainty and mobility restrictions. The timely application of our method to suitable textual datasets can minimize the calamity of future disasters like COVID-19 as well as it can help making suitable policy decisions for sustainable solutions against depression. © 2022 IEEE.

Nowcasting unemployment rate during the COVID-19 pandemic using Twitter data: The case of South Africa.

The global economy has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many countries are experiencing a severe and destructive recession. A significant number of firms and businesses have gone bankrupt or been scaled down, and many individuals have lost their jobs. The main goal of this study is to support policy- and decision-makers with additional and real-time information about the labor market flow using Twitter data. We leverage the data to trace and nowcast the unemployment rate of South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we create a dataset of unemployment-related tweets using certain keywords. Principal Component Regression (PCR) is then applied to nowcast the unemployment rate using the gathered tweets and their sentiment scores. Numerical results indicate that the volume of the tweets has a positive correlation, and the sentiments of the tweets have a negative correlation with the unemployment rate during and before the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the now-casted unemployment rate using PCR has an outstanding evaluation result with a low Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Symmetric MAPE (SMAPE) of 0.921, 0.018, 0.018, respectively and a high R2-score of 0.929.

Public Sentiment Assessment of Coronavirus-Specific Tweets using a Transformer-based BERT Classifier

Worldwide, the (COVID-19) pandemic had also affected people's daily routines. In general also during lockdown periods, people around the world use social media to express their thoughts and feelings about the epidemic which has interrupted their daily lives. There has been a huge spike in tweets about coronavirus on Twitter in a short period of time, including both positive and negative messages. As a result of the wide range of content in the tweets, the researchers have turned to sentiment analysis in order to gauge how the general public feels about COVID-19. According to the findings of this study, the best way to examine COVID-19 is to look athow people use Twitter to share theirthoughts and opinions. Sentiment categorization can be accomplished by utilising a variety of feature sets as well as classifiers in combination with the suggested approach. Tweets collected from people with COVID-19 perceptions can be used to better understand and manage the epidemic. Positive, negative, as well as neutral emotion classifications are being usedto classify tweets. In this study, Tweets containing specific information about the Coronavirus epidemic are used as sentiment analysis packages. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) are used to identify sentiment categories, whereas the TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) prototype is used to summarise the topics of postings. Trend analysis and qualitative methods are being used to identify negative sentiment traits. In general, when it comes to sentiment classification, the fine-tuned BERT is very accurate. In addition, the COVID-19related post features of TF-IDF themes are accurately conveyed. Coronavirus tweet sentiments are analysedusing a BERT and TF-IDF hybrid classifier. Single-sentence classification is transformedinto pair-sentence classification, which solves BERT's performance issue in text classification problems. Our evaluation measures (accuracy= 0.70;precision= 0.67;recall= 0.64;and F1-score= 0.65) are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the classifier. © 2022 IEEE.

Deep learning modeling of public's sentiments towards temporal evolution of COVID-19 transmission.

Public sentiments towards global pandemics are important for public health assessment and disease control. This study develops a modularized deep learning framework to quantify public sentiments towards COVID-19, followed by leveraging the predicted sentiments to model and forecast the daily growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases globally, via a proposed G parameter. In the proposed framework, public sentiments are first modeled via a valence dimensional indicator, instead of discrete schemas, and are classified into 4 primary emotional categories: (a) neutral; (b) negative; (c) positive; (d) ambivalent, by using multiple word embedding models and classifiers for text sentiments analyses and classification. The trained model is subsequently applied to analyze large volumes (millions in quantity) of daily Tweets pertaining to COVID-19, ranging from 22 Jan 2020 to 10 May 2020. The results demonstrate that the global community gradually evokes both positive and negative sentiments towards COVID-19 over time compared to the dominant neural emotion at its inception. The predicted time-series sentiments are then leveraged to train a deep neural network (DNN) to model and forecast the G parameter by achieving the lowest possible mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) score of around 17.0% during the model's testing step with the optimal model configuration.

Analysis of the Covid-19 Process in Terms of Health Managers

In this study, sentiment analysis was conducted on the data of the Covid-19 epidemic process from the official twitter account of the Republic of Turkey Fahrettin Koca, Minister of Health, @drfahrettinkoca (SO) and the Twitter account of the @WHO (World Health Organization). First of all, twitter data was obtained and necessary arrangements were made for analysis. Then, tweets were shown with a word cloud and it was determined which words were used more frequently. Afterwards, sentiment analysis was performed on the data using the TextBlob library. In addition, it has been found out which subjects are focused on tweets sent from SO and @WHO (World Health Organization) accounts with the LDA algorithm. It has been seen that positive tweets were sent from both accounts, giving positive messages to the society. © 2022 IEEE.

Utilizing Data from Twitter to Explore the UX of “Madrasati” as a Saudi e-Learning Platform Compelled by the Pandemic

Purpose: When a website or application is designed and deployed rapidly as a response to an urgent need, it may not satisfy users. Therefore, we decided to investigate users’ attitudes and (dis)satisfaction towards the UX of the Madrasati platform, an e-learning system that was developed by the Saudi Ministry of Education as an alternative to traditional learning during the COVID-19 crisis. Method: The study utilizes Twitter to collect a large volume of data (177,358 tweets) related to Madrasati. Two relevant hashtags #Madrasati (يتسردم#) and #Minaset Madrasati (يتسردم ةصنم#) were used to collect data within the first two months after the launch of the platform. The two-month period was split into four phases: Pre-Semester Phase, Familiarization Phase, Interaction Phase, and Use Phase. The Microsoft Product Reaction Cards (MPRC) tool was implemented to judge user satisfaction/dissatisfaction. Results: The findings show a sudden dissatisfaction about the platform upon launch, but a gradual increase in positive UX over time. Various categories of negative UX (e.g., errors, user denial, and speed issues) gradually became less and less over the observed two months. More importantly, the results show how big data from Twitter can be used for analyzing the UX of a new product. Conclusion: UX is not static;it can change positively over time as users gain more experience with the system. © 2021, Emerald Group Holdings Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Mining Public Opinions on COVID-19 Vaccination: A Temporal Analysis to Support Combating Misinformation.

This article presents a study that applied opinion analysis about COVID-19 immunization in Brazil. An initial set of 143,615 tweets was collected containing 49,477 pro- and 44,643 anti-vaccination and 49,495 neutral posts. Supervised classifiers (multinomial naïve Bayes, logistic regression, linear support vector machines, random forests, adaptative boosting, and multilayer perceptron) were tested, and multinomial naïve Bayes, which had the best trade-off between overfitting and correctness, was selected to classify a second set containing 221,884 unclassified tweets. A timeline with the classified tweets was constructed, helping to identify dates with peaks in each polarity and search for events that may have caused the peaks, providing methodological assistance in combating sources of misinformation linked to the spread of anti-vaccination opinion.

Mood detection and prediction using conventional machine learning techniques on COVID19 data.

Emotion detection is a promising field of research in multiple perspectives such as psychology, marketing, network analysis and so on. Multiple models have been suggested over the years for accurate and efficient mood detection. Identifying emotion, or mood, from text has progressed from a simple frequency distribution analysis to far more complicated learning approaches. The main aim of all these text mining and analysis is twofold. First is to categorise existing text into broad classes of emotions, such as happy, sad, angry, surprised and so on. The second aim is to accurately predict the moods of real-time streaming text. The novelty of the work lies in the extensive comparison of nine conventional learning methods with respect to performance metrics precision, recall, F1 and accuracy as well as studying the variance of mood over time using a wide array of moods (25). Using conventional classifiers allow near real-time predictions, can work on considerably less training data, and has the flexibility of feature engineering, as deep learning methods have feature engineering embedded in the model. Since a single line of text can be associated with multiple emotions, this article compares the performance of classifiers in predicting multiple moods for streaming text with likelihood-based ranking. An android application named Citizens' Sense was developed for text collection and analysis. The performance of mood classifiers are tested further using Twitter data related to COVID19. Based on the precision, recall, F1 and accuracy of the classifiers, it can be seen that Random Forest, Decision Tree and Complement Naive Bayes classifiers are marginally better than the other classifiers. The variance of mood over time, and predicted moods for text support this finding.