Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Anthrax Event Detection Using Twitter: Analysis Of Unigram And Bigrams For Relevant Vs Non-Relevant Tweets, Michele Miller, William L. Romine

Symposium of Student Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Materials

Due to the lack of anthrax attacks in recent times, researchers have used naturally occurring events to assess their anthrax detection models, but these provide little information on how the models will perform in the context of an unannounced, intentional release of a bioterrorism agent, like anthrax. Therefore, it is important to develop a detection model using data surrounding real anthrax scares and events.We develop a methodology to detect an anthrax-related event on Twitter. We describe a process to separate the tweets concerning anthrax-related events from those not related so experts can address misconceptions and fears in real-time.Most tweets were …