Should we tweet this? Generative response modeling for predicting reception of public health messaging on Twitter
Authors
Sanders, Abraham
Ray-Majumder, Debjani
Erickson, John S.
Bennett, Kristin P.
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Issue Date
2022-07-01
Keywords
web science , computational social science , natural language processing , twitter , COVID-19
Degree
Terms of Use
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States
Full Citation
Abraham Sanders, Debjani Ray-Majumder, John Erickson, and Kristin Bennett. 2022. Should we tweet this? Generative response modeling for predicting reception of public health messaging on Twitter. In 14th ACM Web Science Conference 2022 (WebSci '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 307–318. https://doi.org/10.1145/3501247.3531574
Abstract
The way people respond to messaging from public health organizations on social media can provide insight into public perceptions on critical health issues, especially during a global crisis such as COVID-19. It could be valuable for high-impact organizations such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organization (WHO) to understand how these perceptions impact reception of messaging on health policy recommendations. We collect two datasets of public health messages and their responses from Twitter relating to COVID-19 and Vaccines, and introduce a predictive method which can be used to explore the potential reception of such messages. Specifically, we harness a generative model (GPT-2) to directly predict probable future responses and demonstrate how it can be used to optimize expected reception of important health guidance. Finally, we introduce a novel evaluation scheme with extensive statistical testing which allows us to conclude that our models capture the semantics and sentiment found in actual public health responses.
Description
Department
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA