Abstract
With the rapid growth of social media, there is increasing potential to augment traditional public health surveillance methods with data from social media. We describe a framework for performing public health surveillance on Twitter data. Our framework, which is publicly available, consists of three components that work together to detect health-related trends in social media: a concept extraction component for identifying health-related concepts, a concept aggregation component for identifying how the extracted health-related concepts relate to each other, and a trend detection component for determining when the aggregated health-related concepts are trending. We describe the architecture of the framework and several components that have been implemented in the framework, identify other components that could be used with the framework, and evaluate our framework on approximately 1.5 years of tweets. While it is difficult to determine how accurately a Twitter trend reflects a trend in the real world, we discuss the differences in trends detected by several different methods and compare flu trends detected by our framework to data from Google Flu Trends.- Anthology ID:
- L14-1739
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2014
- Address:
- Reykjavik, Iceland
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- Language:
- URL:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/985_Paper.pdf
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Andrew Yates, Jon Parker, Nazli Goharian, and Ophir Frieder. 2014. A Framework for Public Health Surveillance. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- A Framework for Public Health Surveillance (Yates et al., LREC 2014)
- PDF:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/985_Paper.pdf