Understanding the vaccine stance of Italian tweets and addressing language changes through the COVID-19 pandemic: Development and validation of a machine learning model.

ABSTRACT: Social media is increasingly being used to express opinions and attitudes toward vaccines. The vaccine stance of social media posts can be classified in almost real-time using machine learning. We describe the use of a Transformer-based machine learning model for analyzing vaccine stance of Italian tweets, and demonstrate the need to address changes over time in vaccine-related language, through periodic model retraining. Vaccine-related tweets were collected through a platform developed for the European Joint Action on Vaccination. Two datasets were collected, the first between November 2019 and June 2020, the second from April to September 2021. The tweets were manually categorized by three independent annotators. After cleaning, the total dataset consisted of 1,736 tweets with 3 categor

SUBMITTER: Cheatham S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9372360 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature