You Are What You Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for Public Health

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Analyzing user messages in social media can measure different population characteristics, including public health measures. We show quantitative correlations with public health data and qualitative evaluations of model output.

🔑 Key Findings

• For example, recent work has correlated Twitter messages with influenza rates in the United States; but this has largely been the extent of mining Twitter for public health.
• In this work, we consider a broader range of public health applications for Twitter.
• We apply the recently introduced Ailment Topic Aspect Model to over one and a half million health related tweets and discover mentions of over a dozen ailments, including allergies, obesity and insomnia.

🔗 Related Resources