Evidence map›Paper›PMID 33449904›Full record

ArticleJournal of medical Internet research2021

Toward Using Twitter for Tracking COVID-19: A Natural Language Processing Pipeline and Exploratory Data Set.

Ari Z Klein, Arjun Magge, Karen O'Connor, Jesus Ivan Flores Amaro, Davy Weissenbacher, Graciela Gonzalez Hernandez

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of medical Internet research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
23citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.

  1. When Infodemic Meets Epidemic: Systematic Literature Review.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2025
    Pooled it
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

6 authors.

Ari Z KleinDepartment of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.ORCID 0000-0002-8281-3464
Arjun MaggeDepartment of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.ORCID 0000-0002-4109-1346
Karen O'ConnorDepartment of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.ORCID 0000-0001-7709-3813
Jesus Ivan Flores AmaroDepartment of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.ORCID 0000-0002-1912-0112
Davy WeissenbacherDepartment of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.ORCID 0000-0001-8331-3675
Graciela Gonzalez HernandezDepartment of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.ORCID 0000-0002-6416-9556

Funding

Social Media Mining for PharmacovigilanceR01LM011176 · NLM · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · PI GONZALEZ HERNANDEZ, GRACIELA, SHEN, LI · 2012 to 2021
$4.5M
Tracking Evolution and Spread of Viral Genomes by Geospatial Observation ErrorR01AI117011 · NIAID · ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY-TEMPE CAMPUS · PI GONZALEZ HERNANDEZ, GRACIELA, SCOTCH, MATTHEW · 2016 to 2019
$1.9M
NIAID NIH HHS R01 AI117011NLM NIH HHS R01 LM011176
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundIn the United States, the rapidly evolving COVID-19 outbreak, the shortage of available testing, and the delay of test results present challenges for actively monitoring its spread based on testing alone.

objectiveThe objective of this study was to develop, evaluate, and deploy an automatic natural language processing pipeline to collect user-generated Twitter data as a complementary resource for identifying potential cases of COVID-19 in the United States that are not based on testing and, thus, may not have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

methodsBeginning January 23, 2020, we collected English tweets from the Twitter Streaming application programming interface that mention keywords related to COVID-19. We applied handwritten regular expressions to identify tweets indicating that the user potentially has been exposed to COVID-19. We automatically filtered out "reported speech" (eg, quotations, news headlines) from the tweets that matched the regular expressions, and two annotators annotated a random sample of 8976 tweets that are geo-tagged or have profile location metadata, distinguishing tweets that self-report potential cases of COVID-19 from those that do not. We used the annotated tweets to train and evaluate deep neural network classifiers based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). Finally, we deployed the automatic pipeline on more than 85 million unlabeled tweets that were continuously collected between March 1 and August 21, 2020.

resultsInterannotator agreement, based on dual annotations for 3644 (41%) of the 8976 tweets, was 0.77 (Cohen κ). A deep neural network classifier, based on a BERT model that was pretrained on tweets related to COVID-19, achieved an F

conclusionsWe have made the 13,714 tweets identified in this study, along with each tweet's time stamp and US state-level geolocation, publicly available to download. This data set presents the opportunity for future work to assess the utility of Twitter data as a complementary resource for tracking the spread of COVID-19.

Indexed as

Datasets as TopicNatural Language ProcessingCOVID-19Disease OutbreaksHumansLongitudinal StudiesSARS-CoV-2Self ReportSocial MediaSpeechUnited StatescoronavirusCOVID-19data miningepidemiologyinfodemiologynatural language processingpandemicssocial media

Identifiers

PMID33449904
PMCPMC7834613

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.