Harshvadan Talpada

Bio: Harshvadan Talpada is an academic researcher from Charles Sturt University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Sentiment analysis. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 6 citations.

An Analysis on Use of Deep Learning and Lexical-Semantic Based Sentiment Analysis Method on Twitter Data to Understand the Demographic Trend of Telemedicine

Abstract: Technology has turned into a fundamental piece of everybody's life. Social media technology is already used widely by the public to speak out once mind openly. This data can be leveraged to have a better understanding of the current state of decision making. However, Twitter data is highly unstructured. Sentiment analysis can be applied to such health-related data to extract useful information regarding public opinion. The aim of the research is to understand (i) the correlation between Deep Learning versus lexical and semantic-based sentiment prediction methods, (ii) the sentiment prediction accuracy of these methods on manually annotated sentiment dataset (iii) domain-specific knowledge on accuracy of the sentiment prediction methods, and (iv) to utilize Twitterbased sentiment to understand the influence of telemedicine in regards to heart attack and epilepsy. Four sentiment prediction methods are utilized for the research; Lexical and Semantic-based (Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER) and TextBlob) and Deep Learning based (Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and sentiment model from Stanford CoreNLP). The dataset that we retrieved consists of 1.84 million old health-related tweets. Our finding suggests that lexical and semantic-based methods for sentiment prediction offer better accuracy than Deep Learning methods; when a large enough and evenly distributed training dataset is not available. We observed that domain-specific knowledge affects the prediction accuracy of sentiment, mainly when the target text contains more domain-specific words. Sentiment prediction on Twitter data can be utilized to understand the demographic distribution of sentiment. In our case, we observed that telemedicine has a high number of positive sentiment. It is still in its infancy and has not spread to a broader demographic.

A Deep Language-independent Network to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the World via Sentiment Analysis

Abstract: Towards the end of 2019, Wuhan experienced an outbreak of novel coronavirus, which soon spread all over the world, resulting in a deadly pandemic that infected millions of people around the globe. The government and public health agencies followed many strategies to counter the fatal virus. However, the virus severely affected the social and economic lives of the people. In this paper, we extract and study the opinion of people from the top five worst affected countries by the virus, namely USA, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa. We propose a deep language-independent Multilevel Attention-based Conv-BiGRU network (MACBiG-Net), which includes embedding layer, word-level encoded attention, and sentence-level encoded attention mechanism to extract the positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. The embedding layer encodes the sentence sequence into a real-valued vector. The word-level and sentence-level encoding is performed by a 1D Conv-BiGRU based mechanism, followed by word-level and sentence-level attention, respectively. We further develop a COVID-19 Sentiment Dataset by crawling the tweets from Twitter. Extensive experiments on our proposed dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MACBiG-Net. Also, attention-weights visualization and in-depth results analysis shows that the proposed network has effectively captured the sentiments of the people.

Language and Sentiment Regarding Telemedicine and COVID-19 on Twitter: Longitudinal Infodemiology Study.

Abstract: Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a rapid shift in how individuals interact with and receive fundamental services, including health care. Although telemedicine is not a novel technology, previous studies have offered mixed opinions surrounding its utilization. However, there exists a dearth of research on how these opinions have evolved over the course of the current pandemic. Objective: This study aims to evaluate how the language and sentiment surrounding telemedicine has evolved throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Tweets published between January 1, 2020, and April 24, 2021, containing at least one telemedicine-related and one COVID-19–related search term (“telemedicine-COVID”) were collected from the Twitter full archive search (N=351,718). A comparator sample containing only COVID-19 terms (“general-COVID”) was collected and sampled based on the daily distribution of telemedicine-COVID tweets. In addition to analyses of retweets and favorites, sentiment analysis was performed on both data sets in aggregate and within a subset of tweets receiving the top 100 most and least retweets. Results: Telemedicine gained prominence during the early stages of the pandemic (ie, March through May 2020) before leveling off and reaching a steady state from June 2020 onward. Telemedicine-COVID tweets had a 21% lower average number of retweets than general-COVID tweets (incidence rate ratio 0.79, 95% CI 0.63-0.99; P=.04), but there was no difference in favorites. A majority of telemedicine-COVID tweets (180,295/351,718, 51.3%) were characterized as “positive,” compared to only 38.5% (135,434/351,401) of general-COVID tweets (P<.001). This trend was also true on a monthly level from March 2020 through April 2021. The most retweeted posts in both telemedicine-COVID and general-COVID data sets were authored by journalists and politicians. Whereas the majority of the most retweeted posts within the telemedicine-COVID data set were positive (55/101, 54.5%), a plurality of the most retweeted posts within the general-COVID data set were negative (44/89, 49.4%; P=.01). Conclusions: During the COVID-19 pandemic, opinions surrounding telemedicine evolved to become more positive, especially when compared to the larger pool of COVID-19–related tweets. Decision makers should capitalize on these shifting public opinions to invest in telemedicine infrastructure and ensure its accessibility and success in a postpandemic world.