Changes in Psycholinguistic Attributes of Social Media Users Before, During, and After Self-Reported Influenza Symptoms

Lucie Flekova, Vasileios Lampos, Ingemar Cox


Abstract
Previous research has linked psychological and social variables to physical health. At the same time, psychological and social variables have been successfully predicted from the language used by individuals in social media. In this paper, we conduct an initial exploratory study linking these two areas. Using the social media platform of Twitter, we identify users self-reporting symptoms that are descriptive of influenza-like illness (ILI). We analyze the tweets of those users in the periods before, during, and after the reported symptoms, exploring emotional, cognitive, and structural components of language. We observe a post-ILI increase in social activity and cognitive processes, possibly supporting previous offline findings linking more active social activities and stronger cognitive coping skills to a better immune status.
Anthology ID:
W18-5905
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SMM4H: The 3rd Social Media Mining for Health Applications Workshop & Shared Task
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez, Davy Weissenbacher, Abeed Sarker, Michael Paul
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17–21
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5905
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-5905
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucie Flekova, Vasileios Lampos, and Ingemar Cox. 2018. Changes in Psycholinguistic Attributes of Social Media Users Before, During, and After Self-Reported Influenza Symptoms. In Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SMM4H: The 3rd Social Media Mining for Health Applications Workshop & Shared Task, pages 17–21, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Changes in Psycholinguistic Attributes of Social Media Users Before, During, and After Self-Reported Influenza Symptoms (Flekova et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5905.pdf