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People's mental conditions are often reflected in their social media activity due to the internet's anonymity. Psychiatric issues are often detected through such activities and can be addressed in their early stages, potentially preventing the consequences of unattended mental disorders like depression and anxiety. In this paper, the authors have implemented machine learning models and used various embedding techniques to classify posts from the famous social media blog site Reddit as stressful and non-stressful. The dataset used contains user posts that can be analyzed to detect patterns in the social media activity of those diagnosed with mental disorders. This paper uses different NLP (Natural Language Processing) tools such as ELMo (Embeddings from Language Models) word embeddings, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) tokenizers, and BoW (Bag of Words) approach to create word/sentence data that can be fed to machine learning models. The results of each method have been discussed. The results achieved a top F1 score of 0.76, a Precision score of 0.71, and a Recall of 0.74 using only the preprocessed texts and machine learning algorithms to classify the posts. The results achieved by this paper are significant and have the potential to be applied in real-world scenarios to analyze mental stress among social media users. Although this paper focuses on data from Reddit, the techniques used can be transferred to similar social media platforms and could help solve the growing mental health crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the spread of the coronavirus flu in 2019 (hereafter referred to as COVID-19), millions of people worldwide have been affected by the pandemic, which has significantly impacted our habits in various ways. In order to eradicate the disease, a great help came from unprecedentedly fast vaccines development along with strict preventive measures adoption like lockdown. Thus, world wide provisioning of vaccines was crucial in order to achieve the maximum immunization of population. However, the fast development of vaccines, driven by the urge of limiting the pandemic caused skeptical reactions by a vast amount of population. More specifically, the people's hesitancy in getting vaccinated was an additional obstacle in fighting COVID-19. To ameliorate this scenario, it is important to understand people's sentiments about vaccines in order to take proper actions to better inform the population. As a matter of fact, people continuously update their feelings and sentiments on social media, thus a proper analysis of those opinions is an important challenge for providing proper information to avoid misinformation. More in detail, sentiment analysis (Wankhade et al. in Artif Intell Rev 55(7):5731–5780, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-022-10144-1) is a powerful technique in natural language processing that enables the identification and classification of people feelings (mainly) in text data. It involves the use of machine learning algorithms and other computational techniques to analyze large volumes of text and determine whether they express positive, negative or neutral sentiment. Sentiment analysis is widely used in industries such as marketing, customer service, and healthcare, among others, to gain actionable insights from customer feedback, social media posts, and other forms of unstructured textual data. In this paper, Sentiment Analysis will be used to elaborate on people reaction to COVID-19 vaccines in order to provide useful insights to improve the correct understanding of their correct usage and possible advantages. In this paper, a framework that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) methods is proposed for classifying tweets based on their polarity values. We analyzed Twitter data related to COVID-19 vaccines after the most appropriate pre-processing on them. More specifically, we identified the word-cloud of negative, positive, and neutral words using an artificial intelligence tool to determine the sentiment of tweets. After this pre-processing step, we performed classification using the BERT + NBSVM model to classify people's sentiments about vaccines. The reason for choosing to combine bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) and Naive Bayes and support vector machine (NBSVM) can be understood by considering the limitation of BERT-based approaches, which only leverage encoder layers, resulting in lower performance on short texts like the ones used in our analysis. Such a limitation can be ameliorated by using Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine approaches that are able to achieve higher performance in short text sentiment analysis. Thus, we took advantage of both BERT features and NBSVM features to define a flexible framework for our sentiment analysis goal related to vaccine sentiment identification. Moreover, we enrich our results with spatial analysis of the data by using geo-coding, visualization, and spatial correlation analysis to suggest the most suitable vaccination centers to users based on the sentiment analysis outcomes. In principle, we do not need to implement a distributed architecture to run our experiments as the available public data are not massive. However, we discuss a high-performance architecture that will be used if the collected data scales up dramatically. We compared our approach with the state-of-art methods by comparing most widely used metrics like Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F-measure. The proposed BERT + NBSVM outperformed alternative models by achieving 73% accuracy, 71% precision, 88% recall and 73% F-measure for classification of positive sentiments while 73% accuracy, 71% precision, 74% recall and 73% F-measure for classification of negative sentiments respectively. These promising results will be properly discussed in next sections. The use of artificial intelligence methods and social media analysis can lead to a better understanding of people's reactions and opinions about any trending topic. However, in the case of health-related topics like COVID-19 vaccines, proper sentiment identification could be crucial for implementing public health policies. More in detail, the availability of useful findings on user opinions about vaccines can help policymakers design proper strategies and implement ad-hoc vaccination protocols according to people's feelings, in order to provide better public service. To this end, we leveraged geospatial information to support effective recommendations for vaccination centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel author profiling method specially aimed at classifying social network users into the multidimensional perspectives for social business intelligence (SBI) applications. In this scenario, being the user profiles defined on demand for each particular SBI application, we cannot assume the existence of labelled datasets for training purposes. Thus, we propose an unsupervised method to obtain the required labelled datasets for training the profile classifiers. Contrary to other author profiling approaches in the literature, we only make use of the users' descriptions, which are usually part of the metadata posts. We exhaustively evaluated the proposed method under four different tasks for multidimensional author profiling along with state-of-the-art text classifiers. We achieved performances around 88% and 98% of F1 score for a gold standard and a silver standard datasets respectively. Additionally, we compare our results to other supervised approaches previously proposed for two of our tasks, getting very close performances despite using an unsupervised method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method designed to label user profiles in an unsupervised way for training profile classifiers with a similar performance to fully supervised ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are banking on developing machine learning models to help stop the spread of hateful speech on their platforms. The idea is that machine learning models that utilize natural language processing will detect hate speech faster and better than people can. Despite numerous progress has been made for resource reach language, only a few attempts have been made for Ethiopian Languages such as Afaan Oromo. This paper examines the viability of deep learning models for Afaan Oromo hate speech recognition. Toward this, the biggest dataset of hate speech was collected and annotated by the language experts. Variations of profound deep learning models such as CNN, LSTMs, BiLSTMs, LSTM, GRU, and CNN-LSTM are examined to evaluate their viability in identifying Afaan Oromo Hate speeches. The result uncovers that the model dependent on CNN and Bi-LSTM outperforms all the other investigated models with an average F1-score of 87%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intention Analysis is a computational task that analyzes people's desires, wishes, and attitudes from user-generated texts. This sub-field of text mining has recently attracted research interest. This research paper provides an overview and an analysis of the latest studies in this field. These studies were categorized and summarized according to their contributions and the techniques they used. Several proposed approaches and some real applications were investigated in depth and presented in detail. Moreover, some related fields to intention analysis such as Transfer Learning (TL), Spam Detection (SD), and Building Resources (BR) were discussed in this survey of the literature dedicated to Intention Analysis. The aim of this survey is to give a comprehensive view of the intention analysis field supported by a number of graphics and summary tables about the literature. The paper concludes by identifying a number of research topics that can be promising for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depressive disorders (including major depressive disorder and dysthymia) and anxiety (generalized anxiety disorder or GAD) disorders are the two most prevalent mental illnesses. Early diagnosis of these afflictions can lead to cost-effective treatment with a better outcome prospectus. With the advent of digital technology and platforms, people express themselves by various means, such as social media posts, blogs, journals, instant messaging services, etc. Text remains the most common and convenient form of expression. Therefore, it can be used to predict the onset of anxiety and depression. Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases were used to retrieve the relevant literature using a set of predefined search strings. Irrelevant publications were filtered using multiple criteria. The research meta data was subsequently analyzed using the Biblioshiny Tool of R. Finally, a comparative analysis of most suitable documents is presented. A total of 103 documents were used for bibliometric mapping in terms of research outcome over the past years, productivity of authors, institutions, and countries, collaborations, trend topics, keyword co-occurrence, etc. Neural networks and support vector machines are the most popular ML techniques; word embeddings are extensively used for text representations. There is a shift toward using multiple modalities. SVM, Naive Bayes, and LSTM are the most used ML methods; social media is the most used source of data (Twitter is the most common platform); and audio is the most used modality that is combined with text for depressive and anxiety disorders (DAD) detection. Text data provides good cues for the detection of DAD using machine learning. However, the findings in most of the cases are based on a limited amount of data. Using large amounts of data with other modalities can help develop more generalized DAD-detection systems. Asian countries are leading in the research output with China and India being the top countries in terms of the number of research publications. However, more international collaborations are needed. Limited research exists for anxiety disorders. Co-occurrence of anxiety and depressive disorders is high (33% of studies). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zigzag conversational patterns of contents in social media are often perceived as noisy or informal text. Unrestricted usage of vocabulary in social media communications complicates the processing of code-mixed text. This paper accentuates two major aspects of code mixed text: Offensive Language Identification and Sentiment Analysis for Malayalam–English code-mixed data set. The proffered framework addresses 3 key points apropos these tasks—dependencies among features created by embedding methods (Word2Vec and FastText), comparative analysis of deep learning algorithms (uni-/bi-directional models, hybrid models, and transformer approaches), relevance of selective translation and transliteration and hyper-parameter optimization—which ensued in F1-Scores (model's accuracy) of 0.76 for Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) 2020 and 0.99 for European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2021 data sets. A detailed error analysis was also done to give meaningful insights. The submitted strategy turned in the best results among the benchmarked models dealing with Malayalam–English code-mixed messages and it serves as an important step towards societal good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of data pre-processing and word embedding techniques in the context of Arabic document classification in the domain of health-related communication on social media. We evaluate 26 text pre-processings applied to Arabic tweets within the process of training a classifier to identify health-related tweets. For this task we use the (traditional) machine learning classifiers KNN, SVM, Multinomial NB and Logistic Regression. Furthermore, we report experimental results with the deep learning architectures BLSTM and CNN for the same text classification problem. Since word embeddings are more typically used as the input layer in deep networks, in the deep learning experiments we evaluate several state-of-the-art pre-trained word embeddings with the same text pre-processing applied. To achieve these goals, we use two data sets: one for both training and testing, and another for testing the generality of our models only. Our results point to the conclusion that only four out of the 26 pre-processings improve the classification accuracy significantly. For the first data set of Arabic tweets, we found that Mazajak CBOW pre-trained word embeddings as the input to a BLSTM deep network led to the most accurate classifier with F1 score of 89.7%. For the second data set, Mazajak Skip-Gram pre-trained word embeddings as the input to BLSTM led to the most accurate model with F1 score of 75.2% and accuracy of 90.7% compared to F1 score of 90.8% achieved by Mazajak CBOW for the same architecture but with lower accuracy of 70.89%. Our results also show that the performance of the best of the traditional classifier we trained is comparable to the deep learning methods on the first dataset, but significantly worse on the second dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread influence of social media impacts every aspect of life, including the healthcare sector. Although medics and health professionals are the final decision makers, the advice and recommendations obtained from fellow patients are significant. In this context, the present paper explores the topics of discussion posted by breast cancer patients and survivors on online forums. The study examines an online forum, Breastcancer.org, maps the discussion entries to several topics, and proposes a machine learning model based on a classification algorithm to characterize the topics. To explore the topics of breast cancer patients and survivors, approximately 1000 posts are selected and manually labeled with annotations. In contrast, millions of posts are available to build the labels. A semi-supervised learning technique is used to build the labels for the unlabeled data; hence, the large data are classified using a deep learning algorithm. The deep learning algorithm BiLSTM with BERT word embedding technique provided a better f1-score of 79.5%. This method is able to classify the following topics: medication reviews, clinician knowledge, various treatment options, seeking and providing support, diagnostic procedures, financial issues and implications for everyday life. What matters the most for the patients is coping with everyday living as well as seeking and providing emotional and informational support. The approach and findings show the potential of studying social media to provide insight into patients' experiences with cancer like critical health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronary artery calcium (CAC) is a powerful tool to refine atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk assessment. Despite its growing interest, contemporary public attitudes around CAC are not well-described in literature and have important implications for shared decision-making around cardiovascular prevention. We used an artificial intelligence (AI) pipeline consisting of a semi-supervised natural language processing model and unsupervised machine learning techniques to analyze 5,606 CAC-related discussions on Reddit. A total of 91 discussion topics were identified and were classified into 14 overarching thematic groups. These included the strong impact of CAC on therapeutic decision-making, ongoing non-evidence-based use of CAC testing, and the patient perceived downsides of CAC testing (e.g., radiation risk). Sentiment analysis also revealed that most discussions had a neutral (49.5%) or negative (48.4%) sentiment. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of an AI-based approach to analyze large, publicly available social media data to generate insights into public perceptions about CAC, which may help guide strategies to improve shared decision-making around ASCVD management and public health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sarcasm is a type of speech where people use positive words to convey a negative message. Recently, only a few research have been presented that focus on the entire spectrum of sarcasm in order to identify sarcastic sentiments present in both the image and the text. This work presents a novel firebug swarm optimization-based long short-term memory (FSO-LSTM) architecture to identify the sarcastic sentiments present in tweets. To identify the facial expressions of the users, the proposed FSO-based LSTM architecture is trained using the CK + dataset. The FSO algorithm is used to optimize the weighting factors of the LSTM architecture and also minimize the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error. The proposed method primarily attempts to address two challenging issues in sarcasm detection: the high number of false negatives and the fact that polite tweets often go undetected. The user's mood changes (sarcastic) such as rude, polite, furious, and impassive can be identified using the proposed model. Hence, the proposed classifier is capable of analyzing the behavior change of the user by collecting the past twitter account history. The efficiency of the proposed methodology is evaluated using different performance metrics such as accuracy, RMSE, confusion matrix, and loss. The proposed methodology offers an average classification accuracy of 97.25% classification accuracy when compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A remarkable amount of Twitter messages are generated every second. Detecting the location entities mentioned in these messages is useful in text mining applications. Therefore, techniques for extracting the location entities from the Twitter textual content are needed. In this work, we approach this task in a similar manner to the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task, but we focus only on locations, while NER systems detect names of persons, organizations, locations, and sometimes more (e.g., dates, times). But, unlike NER systems, we address a deeper task: classifying the detected locations into names of cities, provinces/states, and countries in order to map them into physical locations. We approach the task in a novel way, consisting in two stages. In the first stage, we train Conditional Random Fields (CRF) models that are able to detect the locations mentioned in the messages. We train three classifiers: one for cities, one for provinces/states, and one for countries, with various sets of features. Since a dataset annotated with this kind of information was not available, we collected and annotated our own dataset to use for training and testing. In the second stage, we resolve the remaining ambiguities, namely, cases when there exists more than one place with the same name. We proposed a set of heuristics able to choose the correct physical location in these cases. Our two-stage model will allow a social media monitoring system to visualize the places mentioned in Twitter messages on a map of the world or to compute statistics about locations. This kind of information can be of interest to business or marketing applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]