A Holistic Framework for Analyzing the COVID-19 Vaccine Debate

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to infodemic of low quality information leading to poor health decisions. Combating the outcomes of this infodemic is not only a question of identifying false claims, but also reasoning about the decisions individuals make. In this work we propose a holistic analysis framework connecting stance and reason analysis, and fine-grained entity level moral sentiment analysis. We study how to model the dependencies between the different level of analysis and incorporate human insights into the learning process. Experiments show that our framework provides reliable predictions even in the low-supervision settings.

Twitter User Representation using Weakly Supervised Graph Embedding

Social media platforms provide convenient means for users to participate in multiple online activities on various contents and create fast widespread interactions. However, this rapidly growing access has also increased the diverse information, and characterizing user types to understand people's lifestyle decisions shared in social media is challenging. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised graph embedding based framework for understanding user types. We evaluate the user embedding learned using weak supervision over well-being related tweets from Twitter, focusing on 'Yoga', 'Keto diet'. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the baselines for detecting user types. Finally, we illustrate data analysis on different types of users (e.g., practitioner vs. promotional) from our dataset. While we focus on lifestyle-related tweets (i.e., yoga, keto), our method for constructing user representation readily generalizes to other domains.

Analysis of Twitter Users' Lifestyle Choices using Joint Embedding Model

Multiview representation learning of data can help construct coherent and contextualized users' representations on social media. This paper suggests a joint embedding model, incorporating users' social and textual information to learn contextualized user representations used for understanding their lifestyle choices. We apply our model to tweets related to two lifestyle activities, `Yoga' and `Keto diet' and use it to analyze users' activity type and motivation. We explain the data collection and annotation process in detail and provide an in-depth analysis of users from different classes based on their Twitter content. Our experiments show that our model results in performance improvements in both domains.

Do You Do Yoga? Understanding Twitter Users' Types and Motivations using Social and Textual Information

Leveraging social media data to understand people's lifestyle choices is an exciting domain to explore but requires a multiview formulation of the data. In this paper, we propose a joint embedding model based on the fusion of neural networks with attention mechanism by incorporating social and textual information of users to understand their activities and motivations. We use well-being related tweets from Twitter, focusing on 'Yoga'. We demonstrate our model on two downstream tasks: (i) finding user type such as either practitioner or promotional (promoting yoga studio/gym), other; (ii) finding user motivation i.e. health benefit, spirituality, love to tweet/retweet about yoga but do not practice yoga.

Does Yoga Make You Happy? Analyzing Twitter User Happiness using Textual and Temporal Information

Although yoga is a multi-component practice to hone the body and mind and be known to reduce anxiety and depression, there is still a gap in understanding people's emotional state related to yoga in social media. In this study, we investigate the causal relationship between practicing yoga and being happy by incorporating textual and temporal information of users using Granger causality. To find out causal features from the text, we measure two variables (i) Yoga activity level based on content analysis and (ii) Happiness level based on emotional state. To understand users' yoga activity, we propose a joint embedding model based on the fusion of neural networks with attention mechanism by leveraging users' social and textual information. For measuring the emotional state of yoga users (target domain), we suggest a transfer learning approach to transfer knowledge from an attention-based neural network model trained on a source domain. Our experiment on Twitter dataset demonstrates that there are 1447 users where "yoga Granger-causes happiness".

Yoga-Veganism: Correlation Mining of Twitter Health Data

Nowadays social media is a huge platform of data. People usually share their interest, thoughts via discussions, tweets, status. It is not possible to go through all the data manually. We need to mine the data to explore hidden patterns or unknown correlations, find out the dominant topic in data and understand people's interest through the discussions. In this work, we explore Twitter data related to health. We extract the popular topics under different categories (e.g. diet, exercise) discussed in Twitter via topic modeling, observe model behavior on new tweets, discover interesting correlation (i.e. Yoga-Veganism). We evaluate accuracy by comparing with ground truth using manual annotation both for train and test data.

Ex-Twit: Explainable Twitter Mining on Health Data

Since most machine learning models provide no explanations for the predictions, their predictions are obscure for the human. The ability to explain a model's prediction has become a necessity in many applications including Twitter mining. In this work, we propose a method called Explainable Twitter Mining (Ex-Twit) combining Topic Modeling and Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanation (LIME) to predict the topic and explain the model predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Ex-Twit on Twitter health-related data.