LocalTweets to LocalHealth: A Mental Health Surveillance Framework Based on Twitter Data

Vijeta Deshpande, Minhwa Lee, Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Jason Brian Gibbons, Hong Yu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Prior research on Twitter (now X) data has provided positive evidence of its utility in developing supplementary health surveillance systems. In this study, we present a new framework to surveil public health, focusing on mental health (MH) outcomes. We hypothesize that locally posted tweets are indicative of local MH outcomes and collect tweets posted from 765 neighborhoods (census block groups) in the USA. We pair these tweets from each neighborhood with the corresponding MH outcome reported by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to create a benchmark dataset, LocalTweets. With LocalTweets, we present the first population-level evaluation task for Twitter-based MH surveillance systems. We then develop an efficient and effective method, LocalHealth, for predicting MH outcomes based on LocalTweets. When used with GPT3.5, LocalHealth achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy of 0.7429 and 79.78%, respectively, a 59% improvement in F1-score over the GPT3.5 in zero-shot setting. We also utilize LocalHealth to extrapolate CDC's estimates to proxy unreported neighborhoods, achieving an F1-score of 0.7291. Our work suggests that Twitter data can be effectively leveraged to simulate neighborhood-level MH outcomes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages10698-10715
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)9782493814104
StatePublished - 2024
Externally publishedYes
EventJoint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Hybrid, Torino, Italy
Duration: May 20 2024May 25 2024

Publication series

Name2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings

Conference

ConferenceJoint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityHybrid, Torino
Period5/20/245/25/24

Keywords

  • Corpus (Creation, Annotation, etc.)
  • Evaluation Methodologies
  • Social Media Processing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'LocalTweets to LocalHealth: A Mental Health Surveillance Framework Based on Twitter Data'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this