Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Applications In Sentiment Analysis And Machine Learning For Identifying Public Health Variables Across Social Media, Eric Michael Clark

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Twitter, a popular social media outlet, has evolved into a vast source of linguistic data, rich with opinion, sentiment, and discussion. We mined data from several public Twitter endpoints to identify content relevant to healthcare providers and public health regulatory professionals. We began by compiling content related to electronic nicotine delivery systems (or e-cigarettes) as these had become popular alternatives to tobacco products. There was an apparent need to remove high frequency tweeting entities, called bots, that would spam messages, advertisements, and fabricate testimonials. Algorithms were constructed using natural language processing and machine learning to sift human responses from automated …