Evidence map›Paper›PMID 35389357›Full record

ArticleJMIR formative research2022

Global User-Level Perception of COVID-19 Contact Tracing Applications: Data-Driven Approach Using Natural Language Processing.

Kashif Ahmad, Firoj Alam, Junaid Qadir, Basheer Qolomany, Imran Khan, Talhat Khan, Muhammad Suleman, Naina Said, Syed Zohaib Hassan, Asma Gul and 2 more

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in JMIR formative research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
2citing papers in PubMed
–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

2 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Review
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

12 authors.

Kashif AhmadInformation and Computing Technology Division, College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0931-9275
Firoj AlamQatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7172-1997
Junaid QadirDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9466-2475
Basheer QolomanyDepartment of Cyber Systems, University of Nebraska, Kearney, NE, United States.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3270-7225
Imran KhanDepartment of Computer Systems Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6945-5044
Talhat KhanDepartment of Computer Systems Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6278-8786
Muhammad SulemanDepartment of Computer Systems Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0370-8878
Naina SaidDepartment of Computer Systems Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8666-442X
Syed Zohaib HassanDepartment of Holistic Systems, SimulaMet, Oslo, Norway.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3830-9869
Asma GulDepartment of Statistics, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women University, Peshawar, Pakistan.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1621-5447
Mowafa HousehInformation and Computing Technology Division, College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3648-6271
Ala Al-FuqahaInformation and Computing Technology Division, College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0903-1204

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundContact tracing has been globally adopted in the fight to control the infection rate of COVID-19. To this aim, several mobile apps have been developed. However, there are ever-growing concerns over the working mechanism and performance of these applications. The literature already provides some interesting exploratory studies on the community's response to the applications by analyzing information from different sources, such as news and users' reviews of the applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no existing solution that automatically analyzes users' reviews and extracts the evoked sentiments. We believe such solutions combined with a user-friendly interface can be used as a rapid surveillance tool to monitor how effective an application is and to make immediate changes without going through an intense participatory design method.

objectiveIn this paper, we aim to analyze the efficacy of AI and NLP techniques for automatically extracting and classifying the polarity of users' sentiments by proposing a sentiment analysis framework to automatically analyze users' reviews on COVID-19 contact tracing mobile apps. We also aim to provide a large-scale annotated benchmark data set to facilitate future research in the domain. As a proof of concept, we also developed a web application based on the proposed solutions, which is expected to help the community quickly analyze the potential of an application in the domain.

methodsWe propose a pipeline starting from manual annotation via a crowd-sourcing study and concluding with the development and training of artificial intelligence (AI) models for automatic sentiment analysis of users' reviews. In detail, we collected and annotated a large-scale data set of user reviews on COVID-19 contact tracing applications. We used both classical and deep learning methods for classification experiments.

resultsWe used 8 different methods on 3 different tasks, achieving up to an average F1 score of 94.8%, indicating the feasibility of the proposed solution. The crowd-sourcing activity resulted in a large-scale benchmark data set composed of 34,534 manually annotated reviews.

conclusionsThe existing literature mostly relies on the manual or exploratory analysis of users' reviews on applications, which is tedious and time-consuming. In existing studies, generally, data from fewer applications are analyzed. In this work, we showed that AI and natural language processing techniques provide good results for analyzing and classifying users' sentiments' polarity and that automatic sentiment analysis can help to analyze users' responses more accurately and quickly. We also provided a large-scale benchmark data set. We believe the presented analysis, data set, and proposed solutions combined with a user-friendly interface can be used as a rapid surveillance tool to analyze and monitor mobile apps deployed in emergency situations leading to rapid changes in the applications without going through an intense participatory design method.

Indexed as

BERTcontact tracing applicationsCOVID-19fastTextNLPRoBertasentiment analysistext classificationtransformers

Identifiers

PMID35389357
PMCPMC9097863

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.