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Social media platforms have emerged as fertile ground for the proliferation of hate speech, which can exacerbate the dissemination of hate crimes. The Federal Bureau of Investigation UCR Program gathers data on hate crimes and disseminates annual reports to identify national patterns and inform law enforcement agencies and policymakers, these reports often fail to keep pace with urgent demands. Real-time monitoring and predictive analysis of hate crime trends are imperative for more effective prevention and response efforts. This paper presents a framework that leverages information extraction techniques to extract incidents from articles published in The New York Times, enabling accurate prediction of hate crime trends at both the federal and state levels. Experimental findings demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to other traditional methods. By expanding forecasting approaches for federal and state levels' hate crime trends, this framework offers valuable insights for law enforcement agencies and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the surge of searching and reading online health‐based articles, maintaining the quality and credibility of online health‐based articles has become crucial. The circulation of deceptive health information on numerous social media sites can mislead people and can potentially cause adverse effects on people's health. To address these problems, this work uses deep learning approaches to automate the assessment and scoring of online health‐related articles' credibility. The paper proposed an Attention‐based Recurrent Multichannel Convolutional Neural Network (ARMCNN) model. The proposed model incorporates a BiLSTM layer, a multichannel CNN layer, and an attention layer and predicts the credibility of online health information. To perform a reliable evaluation of the presented model, we utilize the health articles reviewed by the experts, compiled in a labeled dataset termed "Pubhealth," which consists of thousands of health articles. The results are evaluated using five performance measures, accuracy, precision, recall, f1‐score, and area under the ROC curve (AUC). Furthermore, we extensively compared the proposed model with different deep learning and machine learning models such as Long short‐term memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM, CNN (Convolutional neural network), and RNN‐CNN. The experimental results showed that the proposed model produced state‐of‐the‐art performance on the used dataset by achieving an accuracy of 0.88, precision of 0.92, recall of 0.87, f1‐score of 0.90, and AUC of 0.94. Further, the proposed model yielded better performance than other benchmarked techniques for the credibility assessment of online health articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education organizations are increasingly playing a key role in promoting Sustainable Development within society by disclosing information about applied strategies and achieved sustainable performance via social media. Consequently, platforms like Twitter have evolved into decisive tools for fostering accountability, establishing legitimacy, and displaying engagement to environmental sustainability. First, this paper aims to analyze the impact of published sustainable content on Twitter on the stakeholders' online engagement level within British green universities ranked by the People & Planet University League. Second, the study intends to investigate the influencing factors that enhance online interactions. To attain the purpose a theoretical framework was established and a text mining analysis of 145,941 tweets was conducted to construct both a sustainable and a general online engagement index. Finally, a multivariate regression analysis was employed to create two models based on content type. The results reveal a heightened interest in engaging with sustainable content shared on the official Twitter profiles of the sampled universities in comparison to general information tweets. Furthermore, the findings indicate that organizational attributes, reputational factors, and considerations related to strategy design and implementation of sustainable policies, along with the sentiment polarity of the disseminated content, contribute to elucidating the attained level of online engagement. These factors work together to involve stakeholders in the pursuit of sustainable development goals within Green Universities. Plain Language Summary: Universities' social media sustainable commitment The objective of this study is analysing the reaction of stakeholders to the dissemination of sustainable information, identifying the key generators of engagement that allow Higher Education Institutions. theoretical and conceptual framework was carried out, together with a text mining analysis of a sample of 145.941 tweets and a double regression model. Organizational and reputational attributes and factors related to the design of strategies and implementation of sustainable policies, as well as the polarity of the content transmitted, help to explain the engagement achieved [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People's lives are influenced by social media. It is an essential source for sharing news, awareness, detecting events, people's interests, etc. Social media covers a wide range of topics and events to be discussed. Extensive work has been published to capture the interesting events and insights from datasets. Many techniques are presented to detect events from social media networks like Twitter. In text mining, most of the work is done on a specific dataset, and there is the need to present some new datasets to analyse the performance and generic nature of Topic Detection and Tracking methods. Therefore, this paper publishes a dataset of real-life event, the Oscars 2018, gathered from Twitter and makes a comparison of soft frequent pattern mining (SFPM), singular value decomposition and k-means (K-SVD), feature-pivot (Feat-p), document-pivot (Doc-p), and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). The dataset contains 2,160,738 tweets collected using some seed words. Only English tweets are considered. All of the methods applied in this paper are unsupervised. This area needs to be explored on different datasets. The Oscars 2018 is evaluated using keyword precision (K-Prec), keyword recall (K-Rec), and topic recall (T-Rec) for detecting events of greater interest. The highest K-Prec, K-Rec, and T-Rec were achieved by SFPM, but they started to decrease as the number of clusters increased. The lowest performance was achieved by Feat-p in terms of all three metrics. Experiments on the Oscars 2018 dataset demonstrated that all the methods are generic in nature and produce meaningful clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Communicable diseases pose a severe threat to public health and economic growth. The traditional methods that are used for public health surveillance, however, involve many drawbacks, such as being labor intensive to operate and resulting in a lag between data collection and reporting. To effectively address the limitations of these traditional methods and to mitigate the adverse effects of these diseases, a proactive and real-time public health surveillance system is needed. Previous studies have indicated the usefulness of performing text mining on social media. Objective: To conduct a systematic review of the literature that used textual content published to social media for the purpose of the surveillance and prediction of communicable diseases. Methodology: Broad search queries were formulated and performed in four databases. Both journal articles and conference materials were included. The quality of the studies, operationalized as reliability and validity, was assessed. This qualitative systematic review was guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Results: Twenty-three publications were included in this systematic review. All studies reported positive results for using textual social media content to surveille communicable diseases. Most studies used Twitter as a source for these data. Influenza was studied most frequently, while other communicable diseases received far less attention. Journal articles had a higher quality (reliability and validity) than conference papers. However, studies often failed to provide important information about procedures and implementation. Conclusion: Text mining of health-related content published on social media can serve as a novel and powerful tool for the automated, real-time, and remote monitoring of public health and for the surveillance and prediction of communicable diseases in particular. This tool can address limitations related to traditional surveillance methods, and it has the potential to supplement traditional methods for public health surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes the form of a case study of forest fires that occurred in Indonesia from 2014 to 2019 and were reported on the social media of Twitter. The study was a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) using data scraping or text mining on Twitter based on the keyword "kebakaran hutan" [forest fire] and discourse analysis. The actor-network theory was used to map the actors involved. This study concludes that five discourses show a consistently large pattern of Twitter users responding to the problem of forest fires in Indonesia. Regarding the actors, the government takes an essential role of leadership and information arbitrage on Twitter. Seeing as it is the state's responsibility to ensure the safety of all people, the government must appear to be the main holder of control in managing disaster information traffic to avoid irresponsible information or hoaxes disseminated by parties or actors. These results indicate that the availability of information obtained from every conversation of Twitter users can be used as a study or input in the formulation of evidence-based policy about forest fires. It should be given more attention as an alternative means of solving the issue of forest fires, which has become an annual problem in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) can be regarded as vital sources of information during disasters to improve situational awareness (SA) and disaster management since they play a significant role in the rapid spread of information in the event of a disaster. Due to the volume of data is far beyond the capabilities of manual examination, existing works utilize natural language processing methods based on keywords, or classification models relying on features derived from text and other metadata (e.g., user profiles) to extract social media data contributing to SA and automatically categorize them into the relevant classes (e.g., damage and donation). However, the design of the classification schema and the associated information extraction methods are far less than straightforward and highly depend on: (1) the event type, (2) the study or analysis purpose, and (3) the social media platform used. To this end, this paper reviews the literature for extracting social media data and provides an overview of classification schemas that have been used to assess SA in events involving natural hazards from five different analytical perspectives (content, temporal, user, sentiment, and spatiotemporal) by discussing the prevalent topic categories, disaster event types, purpose of studies, and platforms utilized from each schema. Finally, this paper summarizes classification methods, and platforms that are most commonly used for each disaster event type, and outlines a research agenda with recommendations for future innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since depression often results in suicidal thoughts and leaves a person severely disabled daily, there is an elevated risk of premature mortality due to mental problems caused by depression. Therefore, it's crucial to identify the patient's mental illness as soon as possible. People are increasingly using social media platforms to express their opinions and share daily activities, which makes online platforms rich sources of early depression detection. The contribution of this paper is multifold. First , it presents five machine-learning models for Arabic and English depression detection using Twitter text. The best model for Arabic text achieved an f1-score of 96.6 % for binary classification to depressed and Non_dep. For English text without negation, the model achieved 92 % for binary classification and 88 % for multi-classification (depressed, indifferent, happy). For English text with negation, an 87 %, and 85 % f1 score was achieved for binary and multi-classification respectively. Second , the work introduced a manually annotated Arabic_Dep_tweets_10,000 corpus of 10.000 Arabic tweets, which covered neutral tweets as well as a variety of depressed and happy terms. In addition, two automatically annotated English corpora, Eng_without_negation_60.000 corpus of 60,172 English tweets and Eng_with_negation_57.000 corpus of 57,392 English tweets. Both covered a wide range of depressed and cheerful terms; however, Negation was included in the Eng_with_negation_57.000 corpus. Finally , this paper exposes a depression-detection web application which implements our optimal models to detect tweets that contain depression symptoms and predict depression trends for a person either using English or Arabic language. • More than two-thirds of suicides each year are caused by depression, which is the most common mental illness. • Social media posts can be a useful tool for tracking a variety of mental health conditions, including depression. • The lack of adequate Arabic corpora makes it difficult to use machine learning techniques in depression detection for the Arabic people. • Existing models for English language use binary classification only and does not handle negation in the text. • Twittpy is a web application developed to detect depression symptoms for persons using their text from Arabic or English tweets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media reviews play an increasingly important role in ranking the influence of urban brands. In this study, the public social media review database is mined, and a regression model of urban influence is established. Firstly, this study introduces text mining and data collection. Comment data are collected from static websites and dynamic websites, and ICTCLAS word segmentation tool is used to preprocess the comment data. The algorithm of urban influence level is established, and finally the regression model of urban brand influence is established. A database of 10000 city-related reviews was used in the experiment. The gender thesaurus is established to further improve the accuracy of the experimental results. The feasibility of the model is verified from two aspects: expectation calculation and standardization. This paper analyzes the composition of citizens who comment on social media and the proportion of comment content and puts forward some suggestions to enhance the influence of the city. Finally, it summarizes the popular comments in different months in December and obtains the force points to enhance the influence of the city in different time periods from the structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of the internet and social media, extracting emergency events from online news reports has become an urgent need for public safety. However, current studies on the text mining of emergency information mainly focus on text classification and event recognition, only obtaining a general and conceptual cognition about an emergency event, which cannot effectively support emergency risk warning, etc. Existing event extraction methods of other professional fields often depend on a domain-specific, well-designed syntactic dependency or external knowledge base, which can offer high accuracy in their professional fields, but their generalization ability is not good, and they are difficult to directly apply to the field of emergency. To address these problems, an end-to-end Chinese emergency event extraction model, called EmergEventMine, is proposed using a deep adversarial network. Considering the characteristics of Chinese emergency texts, including small-scale labelled corpora, relatively clearer syntactic structures, and concentrated argument distribution, this paper simplifies the event extraction with four subtasks as a two-stage task based on the goals of subtasks, and then develops a lightweight heterogeneous joint model based on deep neural networks for realizing end-to-end and few-shot Chinese emergency event extraction. Moreover, adversarial training is introduced into the joint model to alleviate the overfitting of the model on the small-scale labelled corpora. Experiments on the Chinese emergency corpus fully prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. Moreover, this model significantly outperforms other existing state-of-the-art event extraction models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Addiction to drugs and alcohol constitutes one of the significant factors underlying the decline in life expectancy in the US. Several context-specific reasons influence drug use and recovery. In particular emotional distress, physical pain, relationships, and self-development efforts are known to be some of the factors associated with addiction recovery. Unfortunately, many of these factors are not directly observable and quantifying, and assessing their impact can be difficult. Based on social media posts of users engaged in substance use and recovery on the forum Reddit, we employed two psycholinguistic tools, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count and Empath and activities of substance users on various Reddit sub-forums to analyze behavior underlining addiction recovery and relapse. We then employed a statistical analysis technique called structural equation modeling to assess the effects of these latent factors on recovery and relapse. Results: We found that both emotional distress and physical pain significantly influence addiction recovery behavior. Self-development activities and social relationships of the substance users were also found to enable recovery. Furthermore, within the context of self-development activities, those that were related to influencing the mental and physical well-being of substance users were found to be positively associated with addiction recovery. We also determined that lack of social activities and physical exercise can enable a relapse. Moreover, geography, especially life in rural areas, appears to have a greater correlation with addiction relapse. Conclusions: The paper describes how observable variables can be extracted from social media and then be used to model important latent constructs that impact addiction recovery and relapse. We also report factors that impact self-induced addiction recovery and relapse. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first use of structural equation modeling of social media data with the goal of analyzing factors influencing addiction recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the current advancement in the Internet, there has been a growing demand for building intelligent and smart systems that can efficiently address the detection of health-related problems on social media, such as the detection of depression and anxiety. These types of systems, which are mainly dependent on machine learning techniques, must be able to deal with obtaining the semantic and syntactic meaning of texts posted by users on social media. The data generated by users on social media contains unstructured and unpredictable content. Several systems based on machine learning and social media platforms have recently been introduced to identify health-related problems. However, the text representation and deep learning techniques employed provide only limited information and knowledge about the different texts posted by users. This is owing to a lack of long-term dependencies between each word in the entire text and a lack of proper exploitation of recent deep learning schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to efficiently and effectively identify depression and anxiety-related posts while maintaining the contextual and semantic meaning of the words used in the whole corpus when applying bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). In addition, we propose a knowledge distillation technique, which is a recent technique for transferring knowledge from a large pretrained model (BERT) to a smaller model to boost performance and accuracy. We also devised our own data collection framework from Reddit and Twitter, which are the most common social media sites. Finally, we employed word2vec and BERT with Bi-LSTM to effectively analyze and detect depression and anxiety signs from social media posts. Our system surpasses other state-of-the-art methods and achieves an accuracy of 98% using the knowledge distillation technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depression is the most prevalent mental disorder that can lead to suicide. Due to the tendency of people to share their thoughts on social platforms, social data contain valuable information that can be used to identify user's psychological states. In this paper, we provide an automated approach to collect and evaluate tweets based on self-reported statements and present a novel multimodal framework to predict depression symptoms from user profiles. We used n-gram language models, LIWC dictionaries, automatic image tagging, and bag-of-visual-words. We consider the correlation-based feature selection and nine different classifiers with standard evaluation metrics to assess the effectiveness of the method. Based on the analysis, the tweets and bio-text alone showed 91% and 83% accuracy in predicting depressive symptoms, respectively, which seems to be an acceptable result. We also believe performance improvements can be achieved by limiting the user domain or presence of clinical information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence by principle is developed to assist but also support decision making processes. In our study, we explore how information retrieved from social media can assist decision-making processes for new product development (NPD). We focus on consumers' emotions that are expressed through social media and analyse the variations of their sentiments in all the stages of NPD. We collect data from Twitter that reveal consumers' appreciation of aspects of the design of a newly launched model of an innovative automotive company. We adopt the sensemaking approach coupled with the use of fuzzy logic for text mining. This combinatory methodological approach enables us to retrieve consensus from the data and to explore the variations of sentiments of the customers about the product and define the polarity of these emotions for each of the NPD stages. The analysis identifies sensemaking patterns in Twitter data and explains the NPD process and the associated steps where the social interactions from customers can have an iterative role. We conclude the paper by outlining an agenda for future research in the NPD process and the role of the customer opinion through sensemaking mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of Online Social Networks offers growing opportunities to examine a number of aspects of the real world and to better understand how human society works at scale. One crucial research direction, constantly evolving over time, concerns the language adopted by users and its impact on online communities. To provide a contribution in this setting, in this paper, we adopt a multi-relational model for social network and identify a new typology of relation, namely co-interest, as an explicit common declaration of engagement towards a given topic among pair of users. Thematic communities can be, hence, derived leveraging such relations. After that, exploiting Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques, we identify and define suitable analysis metrics focusing on the characteristics of the language adopted in such communities. With the objective of analyzing how the adoption of different language may impact the formation of cohesive and strong communities, to make our study general, we consider two very popular and intrinsically different social platforms, namely Twitter and Reddit. The analysis carried out in this paper aims at comparing the two social media to find interesting and novel results about how their users compose textual comments and the corresponding impact on users' interaction. Interestingly, the obtained results show that, although the main factor is related to the popularity of the user generating the content, the characteristics of the adopted language play a non negligible role in the formation of strong communities in social systems. • Investigation about language characteristics of Online Social Networks posts (OSN). • Language analysis to identify the evolution dynamics of online communities. • Correlation between potential post engagement and user adopted language style. • Relationship between the content produced in OSNs and the formation of communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a proliferation of online misinformation and disinformation about the virus. Combating this 'infodemic' has been identified as one of the top priorities of the World Health Organization, because false and misleading information can lead to a range of negative consequences, including the spread of false remedies, conspiracy theories, and xenophobia. This paper aims to combat the COVID-19 infodemic on multiple fronts, including determining the credibility of information, identifying its potential harm to society, and the necessity of intervention by relevant organizations. We present a prompt-based curriculum learning method to achieve this goal. The proposed method could overcome the challenges of data sparsity and class imbalance issues. Using online social media texts as input, the proposed model can verify content from multiple perspectives by answering a series of questions concerning the text's reliability. Experiments revealed the effectiveness of prompt tuning and curriculum learning in assessing the reliability of COVID-19-related text. The proposed method outperforms typical text classification methods, including fastText and BERT. In addition, the proposed method is robust to the hyperparameter settings, making it more applicable with limited infrastructure resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Social media data is notoriously noisy and unclean. Recipe collections and their manual categorization built by users are no exception. However, a consistent and transparent categorization is vital to users who search for a specific entry. Similarly, curators are faced with the same challenge given a large collection of existing recipes: They first need to understand the data to be able to build a clean system of categories. This paper presents an empirical study using machine learning classifiers (logistic regression and decision trees) for the automatic classification of recipes on the German cooking website Chefkoch.de. The central question we aim at answering is: Which information is necessary to perform well at this task? In particular, we compare features extracted from the free text instructions of the recipe to those taken from the list of ingredients. On a sample of 5000 recipes with 87 classes, our feature analysis shows that a combination of nouns from the textual description of the recipe with ingredient features performs best in the logistic regression model (48% F 1). Nouns alone achieve 45% F 1 and ingredients alone 46% F 1. However, other word classes do not complement the information from nouns. Decision trees constantly underperform the logistic regression, however, lead to an interpretable model. On a bigger training set of 50,000 instances, the best configuration shows an improvement to 57% highlighting the importance of a sizeable data set. In addition, we report on the use of these feature vectors for similarity search and ranking of recipes and evaluate on the task of (near) duplicate detection. We show that our method can reduce the manual curation with precision@3 = 0.52. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media are becoming an increasingly important source of information about the public mood regarding issues such as elections, Brexit, stock market, etc. In this paper we focus on sentiment classification of Twitter data. Construction of sentiment classifiers is a standard text mining task, but here we address the question of how to properly evaluate them as there is no settled way to do so. Sentiment classes are ordered and unbalanced, and Twitter produces a stream of time-ordered data. The problem we address concerns the procedures used to obtain reliable estimates of performance measures, and whether the temporal ordering of the training and test data matters. We collected a large set of 1.5 million tweets in 13 European languages. We created 138 sentiment models and out-of-sample datasets, which are used as a gold standard for evaluations. The corresponding 138 in-sample datasets are used to empirically compare six different estimation procedures: three variants of cross-validation, and three variants of sequential validation (where test set always follows the training set). We find no significant difference between the best cross-validation and sequential validation. However, we observe that all cross-validation variants tend to overestimate the performance, while the sequential methods tend to underestimate it. Standard cross-validation with random selection of examples is significantly worse than the blocked cross-validation, and should not be used to evaluate classifiers in time-ordered data scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of social media have increased in importance for understanding human behaviors, interests, and opinions. Business intelligence based on social media can reduce the costs of managing customer trend complexities. This paper focuses on analyzing sensation information representing human perceptual experiences in social media through the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. First a measurement is defined to estimate social sensation intensities, and subsequently sensation characteristics on geo-social media are identified using geo-spatial footprints. Finally, we evaluate the accuracy and F-measure of our approach by comparing with baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media data have emerged as a new source for detecting and monitoring disaster events. A number of recent studies have suggested that social media data streams can be used to mine actionable data for emergency response and relief operation. However, no effort has been made to classify social media data into stages of disaster management (mitigation, preparedness, emergency response, and recovery), which has been used as a common reference for disaster researchers and emergency managers for decades to organize information and streamline priorities and activities during the course of a disaster. This paper makes an initial effort in coding social media messages into different themes within different disaster phases during a time-critical crisis by manually examining more than 10,000 tweets generated during a natural disaster and referencing the findings from the relevant literature and official government procedures involving different disaster stages. Moreover, a classifier based on logistic regression is trained and used for automatically mining and classifying the social media messages into various topic categories during various disaster phases. The classification results are necessary and useful for emergency managers to identify the transition between phases of disaster management, the timing of which is usually unknown and varies across disaster events, so that they can take action quickly and efficiently in the impacted communities. Information generated from the classification can also be used by the social science research communities to study various aspects of preparedness, response, impact and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying which text corpus leads in the context of a topic presents a great challenge of considerable interest to researchers. Recent research into lead-lag analysis has mainly focused on estimating the overall leads and lags between two corpora. However, real-world applications have a dire need to understand lead-lag patterns both globally and locally. In this paper, we introduce TextPioneer, an interactive visual analytics tool for investigating lead-lag across corpora from the global level to the local level. In particular, we extend an existing lead-lag analysis approach to derive two-level results. To convey multiple perspectives of the results, we have designed two visualizations, a novel hybrid tree visualization that couples a radial space-filling tree with a node-link diagram and a twisted-ladder-like visualization. We have applied our method to several corpora and the evaluation shows promise, especially in support of text comparison at different levels of detail. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On September 2013 an attack on the Westgate mall in Kenya led to a four day siege, resulting in 67 fatalities and 175 wounded. During the crisis, Twitter became a crucial channel of communication between the government, emergency responders and the public, facilitating the emergency management of the event. The objectives of this paper are to present the main activities, use patterns and lessons learned from the use of the social media in the crisis. Using TwitterMate, a system developed to collect, store and analyze tweets, the main hashtags generated by the crowd and specific Twitter accounts of individuals, emergency responders and NGOs, were followed throughout the four day siege. A total of 67,849 tweets were collected and analyzed. Four main categories of hashtags were identified: geographical locations, terror attack, social support and organizations. The abundance of Twitter accounts providing official information made it difficult to synchronize and follow the flow of information. Many organizations posted simultaneously, by their manager and by the organization itself. Creating situational awareness was facilitated by information tweeted by the public. Threat assessment was updated through the information posted on social media. Security breaches led to the relay of sensitive data. At times, misinformation was only corrected after two days. Social media offer an accessible, widely available means for a bi-directional flow of information between the public and the authorities. In the crisis, all emergency responders used and leveraged social media networks for communicating both with the public and among themselves. A standard operating procedure should be developed to enable multiple responders to monitor, synchronize and integrate their social media feeds during emergencies. This will lead to better utilization and optimization of social media resources during crises, providing clear guidelines for communications and a hierarchy for dispersing information to the public and among responding organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By aggregating self-reported health statuses across millions of users, we seek to characterize the variety of health information discussed in Twitter. We describe a topic modeling framework for discovering health topics in Twitter, a social media website. This is an exploratory approach with the goal of understanding what health topics are commonly discussed in social media. This paper describes in detail a statistical topic model created for this purpose, the Ailment Topic Aspect Model (ATAM), as well as our system for filtering general Twitter data based on health keywords and supervised classification. We show how ATAM and other topic models can automatically infer health topics in 144 million Twitter messages from 2011 to 2013. ATAM discovered 13 coherent clusters of Twitter messages, some of which correlate with seasonal influenza (r = 0.689) and allergies (r = 0.810) temporal surveillance data, as well as exercise (r = .534) and obesity (r = −.631) related geographic survey data in the United States. These results demonstrate that it is possible to automatically discover topics that attain statistically significant correlations with ground truth data, despite using minimal human supervision and no historical data to train the model, in contrast to prior work. Additionally, these results demonstrate that a single general-purpose model can identify many different health topics in social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic accident detection is an important strategy governments can use to implement policies intended to reduce accidents. They usually use techniques such as image processing, RFID devices, among others. Social network mining has emerged as a low-cost alternative. However, social networks come with several challenges such as informal language and misspellings. This paper proposes a method to extract traffic accident data from Twitter in Spanish. The method consists of four phases. The first phase establishes the data collection mechanisms. The second consists of vectorially representing the messages and classifying them as accidents or non-accidents. The third phase uses named entity recognition techniques to detect the location. In the fourth phase, locations pass through a geocoder that returns their geographic coordinates. This method was applied to Bogota city and the data on Twitter were compared with the official traffic information source; comparisons showed some influence of Twitter on the commercial and industrial area of the city. The results reveal how effective the information on accidents reported on Twitter can be. It should therefore be considered as a source of information that may complement existing detection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media represents a rich environment to collect huge amounts of data containing useful information about people's behaviors and interactions. In particular, such information has been widely exploited for analyzing the mobility of people, as geotagged social media posts allow to extract accurate patterns on movements of people. This paper presents AUDESOME (AUtomatic Detection of user trajEctories from SOcial MEdia), an automatic method for discovering user mobility patterns from social media posts. In particular, the method includes two new unsupervised algorithms: (i) a text mining algorithm, which analyzes social media posts to automatically extract the main keywords identifying the Places-of-Interest (PoI) in a given area; and (i i) a geospatial clustering algorithm, which detects the Regions-of-Interest (RoIs) by using both geotagged posts and extracted keywords. We experimentally evaluated the performance of AUDESOME taking into account the following aspects: identification of keywords, detection of RoIs, and extraction of user trajectories. The experiments, performed on a real dataset containing about 3 million of geotagged items published in Flickr, demonstrate that AUDESOME achieves better results than existing techniques. • An automatic method for discovering user mobility patterns from social media posts. • A novel text mining algorithm to automatically extract the main keywords in an area. • A novel clustering algorithm to detect Regions-of-Interest from geotagged posts. • A way to evaluate the accuracy of the different phases that compose our method. • Experiments have been performed on a real dataset containing 3 million of Flickr items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial technology-based firms (FinTech) are crucial to promoting new technologies and advances in innovations related to the financial field, sustainable development, and financial inclusion. This paper aims to assess the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and open innovation integrated within the public discourse in the social media of FinTech firms, using machine-learning-based social media analysis (SMA). Accordingly, we tracked the behavior of 21 firms based on the empirical material of 32,716 posts on Twitter. The outcomes showed dissimilar discourses based on FinTech firms' activities. However, it was found that only financial infrastructure, lending, and personal finance fields have a discourse related to innovation and, to a lesser extent, related to the SDGs thematic. Thus, awareness of sustainable objectives is still far from being a relevant issue for FinTech, which, in general, has neglected to significantly mention SDGs; nonetheless, innovation and related terms are a consistent topic in this area. Furthermore, hints of the implementation of the open innovation paradigm and interest in novel technologies are demonstrated, in addition to the promotion of different actors and events on social media that serve as a showcase for firms that have a presence on Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The huge volume of user-generated data on social media is the result of the aggregation of users' personal backgrounds, past experiences, and daily activities. This huge size of the generated data, the so-called "big data," has been studied and investigated intensively during the past few years. In spite of the impression one may get from the media, a great deal of data processing has not been uncovered by existing techniques of data engineering and processing. However, very few scholars have tried to do so, especially from the perspective of multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM). These MCDM methods can derive influence relationships and weights associated with aspects and criteria, which can hardly be achieved by traditional data analytics and statistical approaches. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to propose an analytic framework to mine social networks, feed the meaningful information via MCDM methods based on a theoretical framework, derive causal relationships among the aspects of the theoretical framework, and finally compare the causal relationships with a social theory. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) will be adopted to derive topic models based on the data retrieved from social media. By clustering the topics into aspects of the social theory, the probability associated with each aspect will be normalized and then transformed to a Likert-type 5-point scale. Afterwards, for every topic, the feature importance of all other topics will be derived using the random forest (RF) algorithm. The feature importance matrix will be transformed to the initial influence matrix of the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL). The influence relationships among the aspects and criteria and influence weights can then be derived by using the DEMATEL-based analytic network process (DANP). The influence weight versus each criterion can be derived by using DANP. To verify the feasibility of the proposed framework, Taiwanese users' attitudes toward air pollution will be analyzed based on the value–belief–norm (VBN) theory by using social media data retrieved from Dcard (dcard.tw). Based on the analytic results, the causal relationships are fully consistent with the VBN framework. Further, the mutual influences derived in this work that were seldom discussed by earlier works, i.e., the mutual influences between altruistic concerns and egoistic concerns, as well as those between altruistic concerns and biosphere concerns, are worth further investigation in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, social networks present information of great relevance to various government agencies and different types of companies, which need knowledge insights for their business strategies. From this point of view, an important technique for data analysis is to create and maintain an environment for collecting data and transforming them into intelligence information to enable analysts to observe the evolution of a given topic, elaborate the analysis hypothesis, identify botnets, and generate data to aid in the decision-making process. Focusing on collecting, analyzing, and supporting decision-making, this paper proposes an architecture designed to monitor and perform anonymous real-time searches in tweets to generate information allowing sentiment analysis on a given subject. Therefore, a technological structure and its implementation are defined, followed by processes for data collection and analysis. The results obtained indicate that the proposed solution provides a high capacity to collect, process, search, analyze, and view a large number of tweets in several languages, in real-time, with sentiment analysis capabilities, at a low cost of implementation and operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying internet spam has been a challenging problem for decades. Several solutions have succeeded to detect spam comments in social media or fraudulent emails. However, an adequate strategy for filtering messages is difficult to achieve, as these messages resemble real communications. From the Natural Language Processing (NLP) perspective, Deep Learning models are a good alternative for classifying text after being preprocessed. In particular, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are one of the models that perform well for the binary and multi-label text classification problems. In this paper, an approach merging two different data sources, one intended for Spam in social media posts and the other for Fraud classification in emails, is presented. We designed a multi-label LSTM model and trained it on the joint datasets including text with common bigrams, extracted from each independent dataset. The experiment results show that our proposed model is capable of identifying malicious text regardless of the source. The LSTM model trained with the merged dataset outperforms the models trained independently on each dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Early Author Profiling task is feasible in social media documents. • Very small amounts of textual evidence can be modeled from early stages. • The proposed meta-words capture discriminative information of target profiles. • The proposed multi-resolution representation boosted the early recognition. The Author Profiling (AP) task aims to predict demographic characteristics about the authors from documents (e.g., age, gender, native language). The research so far has focused only on forensic scenarios by performing post-analysis using all the available text evidence. This paper introduces the task of Early Author Profiling (EAP) in Twitter. The goal is to effectively recognize profiles using as few tweets as possible from the user history. The task is highly relevant to support social media analysis and different problems related to security and marketing, where prevention and anticipation is crucial. This work proposes a novel strategy that combines a state of the art representation for early text classification and specialized word-vectors for author profiling tasks. In this strategy we build prototypical features called Profile based Meta-Words, which allow us to model AP information at different levels of granularity. Our evaluation shows that the proposed methodology is well suited for profiling little text evidence (e.g., a handful of tweets) in early stages, but as more tweets become available other granularities better encode larger amounts of text in late stages. We evaluated the proposed ideas on gender and language variety identification for English and Spanish, and showed that the proposal outperforms state of the art methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]