Propagandization of Relative Gratification: How Chinese State Media Portray the International Pandemic

While many previous studies have investigated propaganda in connection with misinformation, disinformation, or "fake news” campaigns, they have given insufficient attention to the political messages which are not squarely factually inaccurate but manipulated. This study identifies a political communication strategy, the propagandization of relative gratification, through which propaganda media 1) highlight global chaos to nudge the public's downward comparison to a relatively stable domestic situation;2) portray the nation's adversaries as worse than its allies;and 3) leverages the public's anti-foreign attitude. This study empirically examines Chinese state media's approach to the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in 46 countries in 2020 by analyzing more than 3 million Chinese social media posts using the semantic similarity found in word embedding models. The results reveal that the global pandemic was depicted by the state media as generally more severe than China's domestic situation. The more distant a foreign country's relationship with China, the more severe its COVID-19 representation in China's propaganda, deviating from the country's actual epidemiological severity and what the Chinese general public thinks about it, indicating that a country's relationship with China is an important predictor of how its COVID-19 severity was presented in China's state media. This study extends the understanding of the sophisticated nature of propaganda in the current era. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Political Communication is the property of Routledge 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.)

Utilizing Deep Learning in Arabic Text Classification Sentiment Analysis of Twitter

The number of social media users has increased. These users share and reshare their ideas in posts and this information can be mined and used by decision-makers in different domains, who analyse and study user opinions on social media networks to improve the quality of products or study specific phenomena. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media was used to make decisions to limit the spread of the disease using sentiment analysis. Substantial research on this topic has been done;however, there are limited Arabic textual resources on social media. This has resulted in fewer quality sentiment analyses on Arabic texts. This study proposes a model for Arabic sentiment analysis using a Twitter dataset and deep learning models with Arabic word embedding. It uses the supervised deep learning algorithms on the proposed dataset. The dataset contains 51,000 tweets, of which 8,820 are classified as positive, 37,360 neutral, and 8,820 as negative. After cleaning it will contain 31,413. The experiment has been carried out by applying the deep learning models, Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory while comparing the results of different machine learning techniques such as Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine. The accuracy of the AraBERT model is 0.92% when applying the test on 3,505 tweets.

Emvirus: An embedding-based neural framework for human-virus protein-protein interactions prediction.

Human-virus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play critical roles in viral infection. For example, the spike protein of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) binds primarily to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) protein to infect human cells. Thus, identifying and blocking these PPIs contribute to controlling and preventing viruses. However, wet-lab experiment-based identification of human-virus PPIs is usually expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming, which presents the need for computational methods. Many machine-learning methods have been proposed recently and achieved good results in predicting human-virus PPIs. However, most methods are based on protein sequence features and apply manually extracted features, such as statistical characteristics, phylogenetic profiles, and physicochemical properties. In this work, we present an embedding-based neural framework with convolutional neural network (CNN) and bi-directional long short-term memory unit (Bi-LSTM) architecture, named Emvirus, to predict human-virus PPIs (including human-SARS-CoV-2 PPIs). In addition, we conduct cross-viral experiments to explore the generalization ability of Emvirus. Compared to other feature extraction methods, Emvirus achieves better prediction accuracy.

PRISTINE: Semi-supervised Deep Learning Opioid Crisis Detection on Reddit

The drug abuse epidemic has been on the rise in the past few years, particularly after the start of COVID-19 pandemic. Our preliminary observations on Reddit alone show that discussions on drugs from 2018 to 2020 increased between a range of 45% to 200%, and so has the number of unique users participating in those discussions. Existing efforts focused on utilizing social media to distinguish potential drug abuse chats from unharmful chats regardless of what drug is being abused. Others focused on understanding the trends and causes of drug abuse from social media. To this end, we introduce PRISTINE (opioid crisis detection on reddit), our work dynamically detects-and extracts evolving misleading drug names from Reddit comments using reinforced Dynamic Query Expansion (DQE) and constructs a textual Graph Convolutional Network with the aid of powerful pre-trained embeddings to detect which type of drug class a Reddit comment corresponds to. Further, we perform extensive experiments to investigate the effectiveness of our model. © 2022 IEEE.

NLP Text Classification for COVID-19 Automatic Detection from Radiology Report in Indonesian Language

Radiology is used as an important assessment for patients with pulmonary disease. The radiology images are usually accompanied by a written report from a radiologist to be passed to the other referring physicians. These radiology reports are written in a natural language where they can have different systematic structures based on the language used. In our study, the radiology reports were collected from an Indonesian hospital and written in Bahasa Indonesia. We performed an automatic text classification to differentiate the information written in the radiology reports into two classes, COVID-19 and non COVID-19. To find the best model, we evaluated several embedding techniques available for Bahasa and five Machine Learning (ML) models, namely (1) XGBoost, (2) fastText, (3) LSTM, (4) Bi-LSTM and (5) IndoBERT. The result shows that IndoBERT outperformed the others with an accuracy of 98%. In terms of training speed, the shallow neural network architecture implemented with the fastText library can train the model in under one second and still result in a reasonably good accuracy of 86%. © 2022 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.

Detection of ADR on Covid Vaccine Safety Data

Due to pandemic vaccines are developed at a rapid pace. There is a requirement to ensure proper post-market pharmacovigilance. The proposed model will help speed up this process by classifying the Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) of the vaccines based on the severity. This will help vaccine manufacturers take necessary and timely action. The model will input the patient data (such as symptoms, vaccination details, and patient health details), which will be preprocessed and cleaned. The ADR will then be classified as a minor, major, or deadly reaction. The system made use of Count Vectors (CV), Word TF-IDF, N-gram TFIDF, and Character TF-IDF feature with Naive Bayes, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boost, and Adaboost machine learning classifiers. Using Random Forest with word-level TF-IDF comparatively a higher accuracy of 93.83% and an F1 score of 0.92 was achieved. © 2022 IEEE.

Word embeddings for topic modeling: An application to the estimation of the economic policy uncertainty index

The quantification of economic uncertainty is key to the prediction of macroeconomic variables, such as gross domestic product (GDP), and is particularly crucial in regard to real-time or short-time prediction methodologies, such as nowcasting, where a large amount of time series data is required. Most of the data comes from official agency statistics and non-public institutions, but these sources are susceptible to lack of information due to major disruptive events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of this, it is very common nowadays to use non-traditional data from different sources. The economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index is the indicator most frequently used to quantify uncertainty and is based on topic modeling of newspapers. In this paper, we propose a methodology to estimate the EPU index that incorporates a fast and efficient method for topic modeling of digital news based on semantic clustering with word embeddings, allowing us to update the index in real time, which is something that other studies have failed to manage. We show that our proposal enables us to update the index and significantly reduce the time required for new document assignation into topics. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Examining Rural and Urban Sentiment Difference in COVID-19-Related Topics on Twitter: Word Embedding-Based Retrospective Study.

BACKGROUND: By the end of 2022, more than 100 million people were infected with COVID-19 in the United States, and the cumulative death rate in rural areas (383.5/100,000) was much higher than in urban areas (280.1/100,000). As the pandemic spread, people used social media platforms to express their opinions and concerns about COVID-19-related topics. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to (1) identify the primary COVID-19-related topics in the contiguous United States communicated over Twitter and (2) compare the sentiments urban and rural users expressed about these topics. METHODS: We collected tweets containing geolocation data from May 2020 to January 2022 in the contiguous United States. We relied on the tweets' geolocations to determine if their authors were in an urban or rural setting. We trained multiple word2vec models with several corpora of tweets based on geospatial and timing information. Using a word2vec model built on all tweets, we identified hashtags relevant to COVID-19 and performed hashtag clustering to obtain related topics. We then ran an inference analysis for urban and rural sentiments with respect to the topics based on the similarity between topic hashtags and opinion adjectives in the corresponding urban and rural word2vec models. Finally, we analyzed the temporal trend in sentiments using monthly word2vec models. RESULTS: We created a corpus of 407 million tweets, 350 million (86%) of which were posted by users in urban areas, while 18 million (4.4%) were posted by users in rural areas. There were 2666 hashtags related to COVID-19, which clustered into 20 topics. Rural users expressed stronger negative sentiments than urban users about COVID-19 prevention strategies and vaccination (P<.001). Moreover, there was a clear political divide in the perception of politicians by urban and rural users; these users communicated stronger negative sentiments about Republican and Democratic politicians, respectively (P<.001). Regarding misinformation and conspiracy theories, urban users exhibited stronger negative sentiments about the "covidiots" and "China virus" topics, while rural users exhibited stronger negative sentiments about the "Dr. Fauci" and "plandemic" topics. Finally, we observed that urban users' sentiments about the economy appeared to transition from negative to positive in late 2021, which was in line with the US economic recovery. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates there is a statistically significant difference in the sentiments of urban and rural Twitter users regarding a wide range of COVID-19-related topics. This suggests that social media can be relied upon to monitor public sentiment during pandemics in disparate types of regions. This may assist in the geographically targeted deployment of epidemic prevention and management efforts.

Exploring the echo chamber concept A linguistic perspective

Echo chambers have often been analyzed in social media studies as dysfunctions of communication fostering the polarization of debates and the spreading of conspiracy theories. On the other hand, from a linguistic perspective, very little research has been conducted on these themes. Our work aims to investigate the linguistic dimension of echo chambers, exploring them as ideological structures that are observable when ideological conflict occurs. Using word embedding and corpus-based discourse analysis, we investigate mediatic discourse on COVID-19 in the Coronavirus Corpus and in the Public Coronavirus Twitter Data Set. The analysis focuses on the semantic and pragmatic status of the word hoax, which emerges as a keyword characterizing the Twitter dataset. Our study shows how linguistic markers of ideological conflict can act as markers of position and affective/social identity. © 2022 John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Utilizing Deep Learning in Arabic Text Classification Sentiment Analysis of Twitter

The number of social media users has increased. These users share and reshare their ideas in posts and this information can be mined and used by decision-makers in different domains, who analyse and study user opinions on social media networks to improve the quality of products or study specific phenomena. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media was used to make decisions to limit the spread of the disease using sentiment analysis. Substantial research on this topic has been done;however, there are limited Arabic textual resources on social media. This has resulted in fewer quality sentiment analyses on Arabic texts. This study proposes a model for Arabic sentiment analysis using a Twitter dataset and deep learning models with Arabic word embedding. It uses the supervised deep learning algorithms on the proposed dataset. The dataset contains 51,000 tweets, of which 8,820 are classified as positive, 37,360 neutral, and 8,820 as negative. After cleaning it will contain 31,413. The experiment has been carried out by applying the deep learning models, Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory while comparing the results of different machine learning techniques such as Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine. The accuracy of the AraBERT model is 0.92% when applying the test on 3,505 tweets.

Sentiment Analysis for People's Opinions about COVID-19 Using LSTM and CNN Models

The emergence of social media platforms, which contributed in activating the patterns of connection between individuals, leads to the availability of a huge amount of content such as text, images, and videos. Twitter is one of the most popular platforms of social media that encourage researchers to investigate people's feelings and opinions among through sentiment analysis studies that elicited the interest of researchers in natural language processing field. Many techniques related to machine learning and deep learning models could be used to improve the efficiency and performance of sentiment analysis, especially in complex classification problems. In this paper, different models of long shortterm memory recurrent neural network are used for the sentiment classification task. The input text was represented as vectors using Arabic pre-trained word embedding (Aravec). Experiments were conducted using different dimensions of Aravec on 15779 tweets about COVID-19 collected and labeled as positive and negative. The experimental results show an accuracy value of 98%. © 2023,International journal of online and biomedical engineering. All Rights Reserved.

Predicting Compound-Protein Interaction by Deepening the Systemic Background via Molecular Network Feature Embedding

Identifying compound-protein interactions (CPI) is crucial for drug screening, drug repurposing, and combination therapy studies. The performance of CPI prediction depends heavily on the features extracted from compounds and target proteins. The existing prediction methods use different feature combinations, but both molecular-based and network-based models have the problem of incomplete feature representations. Therefore, completely integrating the relevant features of CPI would be an effective way to solve the existing problem. This study proposed a novel model named MCPI, which integrated the PPI (protein-protein interaction) network, CCI (compound-compound interaction) network, and structure features of CPI to improve prediction performance. We compared our model with other existing methods for predicting CPI on public datasets. The experimental results showed that MCPI outperformed the peer methods. In addition, in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we applied the model to search for potential inhibitors among FDA-approved drugs and validated the prediction results through the literature. This work may also provide potential guidance for drug development. © 2022 IEEE.

DapNet-HLA: Adaptive dual-attention mechanism network based on deep learning to predict non-classical HLA binding sites.

Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) plays a vital role in immunomodulatory function. Studies have shown that immunotherapy based on non-classical HLA has essential applications in cancer, COVID-19, and allergic diseases. However, there are few deep learning methods to predict non-classical HLA alleles. In this work, an adaptive dual-attention network named DapNet-HLA is established based on existing datasets. Firstly, amino acid sequences are transformed into digital vectors by looking up the table. To overcome the feature sparsity problem caused by unique one-hot encoding, the fused word embedding method is used to map each amino acid to a low-dimensional word vector optimized with the training of the classifier. Then, we use the GCB (group convolution block), SENet attention (squeeze-and-excitation networks), BiLSTM (bidirectional long short-term memory network), and Bahdanau attention mechanism to construct the classifier. The use of SENet can make the weight of the effective feature map high, so that the model can be trained to achieve better results. Attention mechanism is an Encoder-Decoder model used to improve the effectiveness of RNN, LSTM or GRU (gated recurrent neural network). The ablation experiment shows that DapNet-HLA has the best adaptability for five datasets. On the five test datasets, the ACC index and MCC index of DapNet-HLA are 4.89% and 0.0933 higher than the comparison method, respectively. According to the ROC curve and PR curve verified by the 5-fold cross-validation, the AUC value of each fold has a slight fluctuation, which proves the robustness of the DapNet-HLA. The codes and datasets are accessible at https://github.com/JYY625/DapNet-HLA.

Natural Language Processing Techniques for Behavior Analysis in Social Networks of Hispanic American University Communities

The Covid-19 confinement has forced certain human groups to look for alternatives to socialize. University communities did not stay out of this context. The presence of student communities called 'confessions' whose purpose is to anonymously express their problems, desires and interests stands out. The main objective of this research is to determine the topics that highlight the cultural aspects and interests of these communities. Confessions pages from 5 Spanish-speaking countries were analyzed. Experiments were carried out on Facebookand Instagram posts using word embeddings and KMeans to cluster the semantic vector space. Anew evaluation approach based on the state-of-the-art was proposed that allow us to select and analyze topic models through specific keywords. As a result, topics of general interest were identified for each community such as 'Academic life', 'Relationships', 'Politics' and 'Personal problems'. The results vary by country. The collected dataset is publicly available1 for any academic purposes. © 2022 IEEE.

Understanding the Use and Abuse of Social Media: Generalized Fake News Detection With a Multichannel Deep Neural Network

Fake news has spread across social media platforms and with the ease of access, negative consequences have come with it on individuals and society. This issue has become a focus of interest among various research communities, including artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. Existing AI-based fake news detection techniques primarily make use of a 1-D convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) with unidirectional word embedding. We propose a multichannel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with different kernel sizes and filters as an AI technique. Multiple embedding of the same dimension with different kernel sizes technically allows the news article to be processed at different resolutions of different n-grams at the same time. Different kernel sizes increase the learning ability of the proposed classification model. The proposed model determines how to integrate these interpretations (different n-grams) most suitably. Three real-world fake news datasets were used in experiments to validate the classification performance. The classification results showed that the proposed model has high accuracy in detecting fake news. Regardless of the dataset, the proposed model can be used for fake news detection in binary classification problems. IEEE

CovTexMiner: Covid Text Mining Using CNN with Domain-Specific GloVe Embedding

The Covid-19 pandemic imposes a significant impact on human life. Due to the pandemic, all over the globe is reducing physical communication and increasing virtual communication (e.g., Online platforms). Most people are sharing and consuming their information through online platforms (i.e., news portals, blogs and social media). The online platforms are producing different aspects of information, including Covid-19. However, Covid-19 information mining from the English textual data is an evolving research task during the Covid-19 pandemic and post-pandemic period. In this regard, this research introduces a Covid-19 text mining system (named CovTexMiner). The CovTexMiner comprises three main modules: (i) Covid-19 corpus development, (ii) Covid-19 text to feature extraction and (iii) CNN-based Covid-19 text mining. The Covid-19 corpus development module developed two types of corpus: a domain-specific GloVe embedding corpus for English text (ECovE) and a classification corpus (ECovC). The Covid-19 text to feature extraction module extracts the more Covid-19-affiliated text features using domain-specific GloVe embedding. At the same time, the CNN-based text mining module trained a binary classifier, which intelligent mining a piece of text contains the Covid-19 information or not. The proposed CovTexMiner obtained maximum accuracy of 88.89% on the developed corpus. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

COVID-19 Article Classification Using Word-Embedding and Different Variants of Deep-Learning Approach

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we go about our everyday lives, and we will continue to see its impact for a long time. These changes especially apply to the business world, where the market is very volatile as a result. Requirements of the people are changing rapidly, as are the restrictions on transport and trade of goods. Due to the intense competition and struggles brought about due to the pandemic, acting first on profit opportunities is crucial to businesses doing well in the current climate. Thus, getting the relevant news in time, out of the huge number of COVID-19 related articles published daily is of utmost importance. The same applies to other industries, like the medical industry, where innovations and solutions to managing COVID-19 can save lives, and money in other parts of the world. Manually combing through the massive number of articles posted every day is both impractical and laborious. This task has the potential to be automated using Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Deep Learning based approaches. In this paper, we conduct exhaustive experiments to find the best combination of word-embedding, feature selection, and classification techniques;and find the best structure for the Deep Learning model for article classification in the COVID-19 context. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Improving mental health surveillance over Twitter text classification using word embedding techniques

Web users are progressively connecting during the pandemic of Covid-19. It causes the social web to grow exponentially by the huge amount of collective information. For example, Twitter, which has been growing very fast as one of the most popular social networking websites. The platform enables tracking mental health surveillance via online by using text classification methods. Latest text classification research showed that tweets can be classified accurately by using word embedding combined with the K-means algorithm. Word embedding is a way for representing words into numbers, so that the word representation can be further fed into the clustering algorithm. However, given the number of choices of word embedding models (Word2Vec, ELMo, and BERT), it raises the question of which type of word embedding has the best performance for text classification tasks. Many kinds of thoughts are spread through Twitter especially which are related to anxiety during the pandemic. This study aims to determine the most accurate web embedding methods in classifying tweets related to Covid pandemic anxiety into a more specific cluster. Each cluster is evaluated whether it has relation to the feeling of loneliness. To analyze the performance of the classification, each model is judged for their quality in which the representation method gets the best quality of clusters. Lastly, three word embedding methods are compared in terms of performance using confusion matrix (precision, recall, F1, and accuracy). © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Exploring Representations for Singular and Multi-Concept Relations for Biomedical Named Entity Normalization

Since the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, peer-reviewed biomedical repositories have experienced a surge in chemical and disease related queries. These queries have a wide variety of naming conventions and nomenclatures from trademark and generic, to chemical composition mentions. Normalizing or disambiguating these mentions within texts provides researchers and data-curators with more relevant articles returned by their search query. Named entity normalization aims to automate this disambiguation process by linking entity mentions onto their appropriate candidate concepts within a biomedical knowledge base or ontology. We explore several term embedding aggregation techniques in addition to how the term's context affects evaluation performance. We also evaluate our embedding approaches for normalizing term instances containing one or many relations within unstructured texts. © 2022 Owner/Author.