Social Media Insights About COVID-19 in Portugal: A Text Mining Approach

Authors

  • Carolina Ferraz Marreiros Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), ISTAR, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal
  • João Bone Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), ISTAR, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal, Select Data, Anaheim, CA, USA
  • Joao C. Ferreira Inov Inesc Inovação—Instituto de Novas Tecnologias, 1000-029 Lisbon, Portugal ,Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), ISTAR, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal
  • Ricardo Ribeiro INESC-ID: INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal, Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13052/jmm1550-4646.19117

Keywords:

Social media, COVID-19, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, public opinion

Abstract

The rapid spread of COVID-19 around the world had a significant impact on daily life. As in other countries, measures were taken in Portugal to combat the exponential increase of cases, such as curfews and the use of masks. Thus, in parallel with the direct consequences on health and the healthcare sector, the pandemic also caused changes in human behavior from a sociological viewpoint.

The objective of this dissertation is to attain a perception of the reality concerning COVID-19. For this purpose, real-time data was extracted from three sources, two of them being social media platforms – Twitter and Reddit – and the other one being Público, a Portuguese online newspaper. The adopted approach, based on topic modelling and sentiment analysis, was validated within the Portugal context, concerning data over a period of one year, but it can equally be employed in similar situations and other countries and provide decision-making support.

After the data extracting, it was prepared for application of natural language processing (NLP) tools specific to the Portuguese language, which can represent a challenge due to the lexical richness. With the gathered information, a dashboard was built, with the purpose of gaining insights on the COVID-19 pandemic in Portugal. It was concluded that the topics discussed on social media reflect the events related to the pandemic. In a final stage, these dashboards were evaluated by public health experts, who highlighted the potential of the results obtained. The data and dashboards will be made available to the scientific community upon request.

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Author Biographies

Carolina Ferraz Marreiros, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), ISTAR, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal

Carolina Ferraz Marreiros received her master’s degree from the Integrated Decision Support Systems Department, University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE), Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently working in the area of data analytics and artificial intelligence. Her areas of interest include artificial intelligence, Neuro-Linguistic Programming and business intelligence.

João Bone, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), ISTAR, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal, Select Data, Anaheim, CA, USA

João Boné is an NLP developer and researcher working for Select Data, a prominent company in the American Healthcare Industry. He received his master’s degree in Integrated Business Intelligence Systems from ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, and his interests include problem-driven solutions related to data analysis and machine learning applications, mostly connected to NLP. He is often drawn by industry and society-related challenges.

Joao C. Ferreira, Inov Inesc Inovação—Instituto de Novas Tecnologias, 1000-029 Lisbon, Portugal ,Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), ISTAR, 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal

João C. Ferreira (PhD) is Assistant Professor with habilitation at ISCTE-IUL. His research interests are in: data science, Text Mining, IoT, AI, and AI application health, energy, transportation, Electric Vehicle, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). He has authored more than 250 papers in computer science. He has executed more than 30 projects (6 as PI), more than 180 scientific paper reviews and more than 25 scientific project evaluation. IEEE CIS Chair 2016-2018 and current vice chair of IEEE Blockchain PT, CIS PT chapter and Bruxels AI and robotics. Main organizer of international conferences such as: OAIR 2013, INTSYS from 2018 to 2022. IEEE senior member since 2015. Guest Editor and topic editor of MDPI in the topics of energies, electronics and Sensors. President of the IEEE CIS in PT (2017–2018). Author of a patent in Edge Computer in a monitoring system for fishing vessels.

Ricardo Ribeiro, INESC-ID: INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal, Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal

Ricardo Ribeiro (PhD) is an Associate Professor at Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, where he is the coordinator of the Artificial Intelligence scientific area, and an integrated researcher at INESC-ID Lisboa, working on Human Language Technologies. His current research interests focus on high-level information extraction from unrestricted text, speech or music, and improving machine-learning techniques using domain-related information. He has participated in several European and Nationally-funded projects and was the Human Language Technologies INESC-ID team coordinator in RAGE (2015–2019) European-funded project and the principal investigator of a Ministry of National Defence funded project on information extraction from text. He has participated in several scientific events, either as organiser or as member of the program committee (IJCAI, ICASSP, LREC, Interspeech) and was the editor of a book on the computational processing of Portuguese.

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Published

2022-09-20

How to Cite

Marreiros, C. F. ., Bone, J. ., Ferreira, J. C. ., & Ribeiro, R. . (2022). Social Media Insights About COVID-19 in Portugal: A Text Mining Approach. Journal of Mobile Multimedia, 19(01), 325–362. https://doi.org/10.13052/jmm1550-4646.19117

Issue

2023: Vol 19 Iss 1

Section

Articles