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Background In recent years, both suicide and overdose rates have been increasing. Many individuals who struggle with opioid use disorder are prone to suicidal ideation; this may often result in overdose. However, these fatal overdoses are difficult to classify as intentional or unintentional. Intentional overdose is difficult to detect, partially due to the lack of predictors and social stigmas that push individuals away from seeking help. These individuals may instead use web-based means to articulate their concerns. Objective This study aimed to extract posts of suicidality among opioid users on Reddit using machine learning methods. The performance of the models is derivative of the data purity, and the results will help us to better understand the rationale of these users, providing new insights into individuals who are part of the opioid epidemic. Methods Reddit posts between June 2017 and June 2018 were collected from r/suicidewatch, r/depression, a set of opioid-related subreddits, and a control subreddit set. We first classified suicidal versus nonsuicidal languages and then classified users with opioid usage versus those without opioid usage. Several traditional baselines and neural network (NN) text classifiers were trained using subreddit names as the labels and combinations of semantic inputs. We then attempted to extract out-of-sample data belonging to the intersection of suicide ideation and opioid abuse. Amazon Mechanical Turk was used to provide labels for the out-of-sample data. Results Classification results were at least 90% across all models for at least one combination of input; the best classifier was convolutional neural network, which obtained an F1 score of 96.6%. When predicting out-of-sample data for posts containing both suicidal ideation and signs of opioid addiction, NN classifiers produced more false positives and traditional methods produced more false negatives, which is less desirable for predicting suicidal sentiments. Conclusions Opioid abuse is linked to the risk of unintentional overdose and suicide risk. Social media platforms such as Reddit contain metadata that can aid machine learning and provide information at a personal level that cannot be obtained elsewhere. We demonstrate that it is possible to use NNs as a tool to predict an out-of-sample target with a model built from data sets labeled by characteristics we wish to distinguish in the out-of-sample target.

Sentiment analysis is an emerging trend nowadays to understand people’s sentiments in multiple situations in their quotidian life. Social media data would be utilized for the entire process ie the analysis and classification processes and it consists of text data and emoticons, emojis, etc. Many experiments were conducted in the antecedent studies utilizing Binary and Ternary Classification whereas Multi-class Classification gives more precise and precise Classification. In Multi-class Classification, the data would be divided into multiple sub-classes predicated on the polarities. Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques would be utilized for the classification process. Utilizing Social media, sentiment levels can be monitored or analysed. This paper shows a review of the sentiment analysis on Social media data for apprehensiveness or dejection detection utilizing various artificial intelligence techniques. In the survey, it was optically canvassed that social media data which consists of texts,emoticons and emojis were utilized for the sentiment identification utilizing various artificial intelligence techniques. Multi Class Classification with Deep Learning Algorithm shows higher precision value during the sentiment analysis.

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.

The ever-increasing social media users has dramatically contributed to significant growth as far as the volume of online information is concerned. Often, the contents that these users put in social media can give valuable insights on their personalities (e.g., in terms of predicting job satisfaction, specific preferences, as well as the success of professional and romantic relationship) and getting it without the hassle of taking formal personality test. Termed personality prediction, the process involves extracting the digital content into features and mapping it according to a personality model. Owing to its simplicity and proven capability, a well-known personality model, called the big five personality traits, has often been adopted in the literature as the de facto standard for personality assessment. To date, there are many algorithms that can be used to extract embedded contextualized word from textual data for personality prediction system; some of them are based on ensembled model and deep learning. Although useful, existing algorithms such as RNN and LSTM suffers from the following limitations. Firstly, these algorithms take a long time to train the model owing to its sequential inputs. Secondly, these algorithms also lack the ability to capture the true (semantic) meaning of words; therefore, the context is slightly lost. To address these aforementioned limitations, this paper introduces a new prediction using multi model deep learning architecture combined with multiple pre-trained language model such as BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet as features extraction method on social media data sources. Finally, the system takes the decision based on model averaging to make prediction. Unlike earlier work which adopts a single social media data with open and close vocabulary extraction method, the proposed work uses multiple social media data sources namely Facebook and Twitter and produce a predictive model for each trait using bidirectional context feature combine with extraction method. Our experience with the proposed work has been encouraging as it has outperformed similar existing works in the literature. More precisely, our results achieve a maximum accuracy of 86.2% and 0.912 f1 measure score on the Facebook dataset; 88.5% accuracy and 0.882 f1 measure score on the Twitter dataset.

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.

Disparate biases associated with datasets and trained classifiers in hateful and abusive content identification tasks have raised many concerns recently. Although the problem of biased datasets on abusive language detection has been addressed more frequently, biases arising from trained classifiers have not yet been a matter of concern. Here, we first introduce a transfer learning approach for hate speech detection based on an existing pre-trained language model called BERT and evaluate the proposed model on two publicly available datasets annotated for racism, sexism, hate or offensive content on Twitter. Next, we introduce a bias alleviation mechanism in hate speech detection task to mitigate the effect of bias in training set during the fine-tuning of our pre-trained BERT-based model. Toward that end, we use an existing regularization method to reweight input samples, thereby decreasing the effects of high correlated training set' s n-grams with class labels, and then fine-tune our pre-trained BERT-based model with the new re-weighted samples. To evaluate our bias alleviation mechanism, we employ a cross-domain approach in which we use the trained classifiers on the aforementioned datasets to predict the labels of two new datasets from Twitter, AAE-aligned and White-aligned groups, which indicate tweets written in African-American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE) respectively. The results show the existence of systematic racial bias in trained classifiers as they tend to assign tweets written in AAE from AAE-aligned group to negative classes such as racism, sexism, hate, and offensive more often than tweets written in SAE from White-aligned. However, the racial bias in our classifiers reduces significantly after our bias alleviation mechanism is incorporated. This work could institute the first step towards debiasing hate speech and abusive language detection systems., Comment: This paper has been accepted in the PLOS ONE journal in August 2020

Background Prescription medication (PM) misuse/abuse has emerged as a national crisis in the United States, and social media has been suggested as a potential resource for performing active monitoring. However, automating a social media-based monitoring system is challenging—requiring advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning methods. In this paper, we describe the development and evaluation of automatic text classification models for detecting self-reports of PM abuse from Twitter. Methods We experimented with state-of-the-art bi-directional transformer-based language models, which utilize tweet-level representations that enable transfer learning (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, AlBERT, and DistilBERT), proposed fusion-based approaches, and compared the developed models with several traditional machine learning, including deep learning, approaches. Using a public dataset, we evaluated the performances of the classifiers on their abilities to classify the non-majority “abuse/misuse” class. Results Our proposed fusion-based model performs significantly better than the best traditional model (F1-score [95% CI]: 0.67 [0.64–0.69] vs. 0.45 [0.42–0.48]). We illustrate, via experimentation using varying training set sizes, that the transformer-based models are more stable and require less annotated data compared to the other models. The significant improvements achieved by our best-performing classification model over past approaches makes it suitable for automated continuous monitoring of nonmedical PM use from Twitter. Conclusions BERT, BERT-like and fusion-based models outperform traditional machine learning and deep learning models, achieving substantial improvements over many years of past research on the topic of prescription medication misuse/abuse classification from social media, which had been shown to be a complex task due to the unique ways in which information about nonmedical use is presented. Several challenges associated with the lack of context and the nature of social media language need to be overcome to further improve BERT and BERT-like models. These experimental driven challenges are represented as potential future research directions.

Most people nowadays depend on the Web as a primary source of information. Statistical studies show that young people obtain information mainly from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. By relying on these data, people may risk drawing the incorrect conclusions when reading the news or planning to buy a product. Therefore, systems that can detect and classify sentiments and assist users in finding the correct information on the Web is highly needed in order to prevent Web surfers from being easily deceived. This paper proposes an intensive study regarding domain-independent classification models for sentiment analysis that should be trained only once. The study consists of two phases: the first phase is based on a deep learning model which is training a neural network model once after extracting robust features and saving the model and its parameters. The second phase is based on applying the trained model on a totally new dataset, aiming at correctly classifying reviews as positive or negative. The proposed model is trained on the IMDb dataset and then tested on three different datasets: IMDb dataset, Movie Reviews dataset, and our own dataset collected from Amazon reviews that rate users&rsquo, opinions regarding Apple products. The work shows high performance using different evaluation metrics compared to the stat-of-the-art results.

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. At the same time, the widespread use of social media has led to an increase in people posting their suicide notes online. Therefore, designing a learning model that can aid the detection of suicide notes online is of great importance. However, current methods cannot capture both local and global semantic features. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based model named TransformerRNN, which can effectively extract contextual and long-term dependency information by using a transformer encoder and a Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) structure. We evaluate our model with baseline approaches on a dataset collected from online sources (including 659 suicide notes, 431 last statements, and 2000 neutral posts). Our proposed TransformerRNN achieves 95.0%, 94.9% and 94.9% performance in P, R and F1-score metrics respectively and therefore outperforms comparable machine learning and state-of-the-art deep learning models. The proposed model is effective for classifying suicide notes, which in turn, may help to develop suicide prevention technologies for social media., Highlights • Early suicide note identification may help to develop suicide prevention technologies for social media. • TranformerRNN was proposed, using the transformer encoder and BiLSTM. • TranformerRNN can extract contextual information and latent features to identify suicide notes. • Our TranformerRNN method outperforms comparable machine learning and state-of-the-art deep learning models.

In the past decade, the rapid spread of large volumes of online information among an increasing number of social network users is observed. It is a phenomenon that has often been exploited by malicious users and entities, which forge, distribute, and reproduce fake news and propaganda. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the automatic detection of fake news on Twitter that involves (a) pairwise text input, (b) a novel deep neural network learning architecture that allows for flexible input fusion at various network layers, and (c) various input modes, like word embeddings and both linguistic and network account features. Furthermore, tweets are innovatively separated into news headers and news text, and an extensive experimental setup performs classification tests using both. Our main results show high overall accuracy performance in fake news detection. The proposed deep learning architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art classifiers, while using fewer features and embeddings from the tweet text.

© 2018 IEEE. The successful use of online material in political campaigns over the past two decades has motivated the inclusion of social media platforms - such as Twitter - as an integral part of the political apparatus. Political analysts are increasingly turning to Twitter as an indicator of public opinion. We are interested in learning how positive and negative opinions propagate through Twitter and how important events influence public opinion. In this paper, we present a neural network-based approach to analyse the sentiment expressed on political tweets. First, our approach represents the text by dense vectors comprising subword information to better detect word similarities by exploiting both morphology and semantics. Then, a Convolutional Neural Network is trained to learn how to classify tweets depending on sentiment, based on an available labelled dataset. Finally, the model is applied to perform the sentiment analysis of a collection of tweets retrieved during the days prior to the latest UK General Election. Results are promising and show that the neural network approach represents an improvement over lexicon-based approaches for positive/negative sentence classification.

With the rapid development of the internet, social media has become an essential tool for getting information, and attracted a large number of people join the social media platforms because of its low cost, accessibility and amazing content. It greatly enriches our life. However, its rapid development and widespread also have provided an excellent convenience for the range of fake news, people are constantly exposed to fake news and suffer from it all the time. Fake news usually uses hyperbole to catch people's eyes with dishonest intention. More importantly, it often misleads the reader and causes people to have wrong perceptions of society. It has the potential for negative impacts on society and individuals. Therefore, it is significative research on detecting fake news. In the paper, we built a model named SMHA-CNN (Self Multi-Head Attention-based Convolutional Neural Networks) that can judge the authenticity of news with high accuracy based only on content by using convolutional neural networks and self multi-head attention mechanism. In order to prove its validity, we conducted experiments on a public dataset and achieved a precision rate of 95.5% with a recall rate of 95.6% under the 5-fold cross-validation. Our experimental result indicates that the model is more effective at detecting fake news.

Big web data from sources including online news and Twitter are good resources for investigating deep learning. However, collected news articles and tweets almost certainly contain data unnecessary for learning, and this disturbs accurate learning. This paper explores the performance of word2vec Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to classify news articles and tweets into related and unrelated ones. Using two word embedding algorithms of word2vec, Continuous Bag-of-Word (CBOW) and Skip-gram, we constructed CNN with the CBOW model and CNN with the Skip-gram model. We measured the classification accuracy of CNN with CBOW, CNN with Skip-gram, and CNN without word2vec models for real news articles and tweets. The experimental results indicated that word2vec significantly improved the accuracy of the classification model. The accuracy of the CBOW model was higher and more stable when compared to that of the Skip-gram model. The CBOW model exhibited better performance on news articles, and the Skip-gram model exhibited better performance on tweets. Specifically, CNN with word2vec models was more effective on news articles when compared to that on tweets because news articles are typically more uniform when compared to tweets.