TY - JOUR
T1 - Vaccine adverse event mining of twitter conversations
T2 - 2-phase classification study
AU - Habibabadi, Sedigheh Khademi
AU - Delir Haghighi, Pari
AU - Burstein, Frada
AU - Buttery, Jim
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Christopher Palmer for providing technical advice for the project. This study did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Publisher Copyright:
©Sedigheh Khademi Habibabadi, Pari Delir Haghighi, Frada Burstein, Jim Buttery.
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Background: Traditional monitoring for adverse events following immunization (AEFI) relies on various established reporting systems, where there is inevitable lag between an AEFI occurring and its potential reporting and subsequent processing of reports. AEFI safety signal detection strives to detect AEFI as early as possible, ideally close to real time. Monitoring social media data holds promise as a resource for this. Objective: The primary aim of this study is to investigate the utility of monitoring social media for gaining early insights into vaccine safety issues, by extracting vaccine adverse event mentions (VAEMs) from Twitter, using natural language processing techniques. The secondary aims are to document the natural language processing techniques used and identify the most effective of them for identifying tweets that contain VAEM, with a view to define an approach that might be applicable to other similar social media surveillance tasks. Methods: A VAEM-Mine method was developed that combines topic modeling with classification techniques to extract maximal VAEM posts from a vaccine-related Twitter stream, with high degree of confidence. The approach does not require a targeted search for specific vaccine reaction–indicative words, but instead, identifies VAEM posts according to their language structure. Results: The VAEM-Mine method isolated 8992 VAEMs from 811,010 vaccine-related Twitter posts and achieved an F1 score of 0.91 in the classification phase. Conclusions: Social media can assist with the detection of vaccine safety signals as a valuable complementary source for monitoring mentions of vaccine adverse events. A social media–based VAEM data stream can be assessed for changes to detect possible emerging vaccine safety signals, helping to address the well-recognized limitations of passive reporting systems, including lack of timeliness and underreporting.
AB - Background: Traditional monitoring for adverse events following immunization (AEFI) relies on various established reporting systems, where there is inevitable lag between an AEFI occurring and its potential reporting and subsequent processing of reports. AEFI safety signal detection strives to detect AEFI as early as possible, ideally close to real time. Monitoring social media data holds promise as a resource for this. Objective: The primary aim of this study is to investigate the utility of monitoring social media for gaining early insights into vaccine safety issues, by extracting vaccine adverse event mentions (VAEMs) from Twitter, using natural language processing techniques. The secondary aims are to document the natural language processing techniques used and identify the most effective of them for identifying tweets that contain VAEM, with a view to define an approach that might be applicable to other similar social media surveillance tasks. Methods: A VAEM-Mine method was developed that combines topic modeling with classification techniques to extract maximal VAEM posts from a vaccine-related Twitter stream, with high degree of confidence. The approach does not require a targeted search for specific vaccine reaction–indicative words, but instead, identifies VAEM posts according to their language structure. Results: The VAEM-Mine method isolated 8992 VAEMs from 811,010 vaccine-related Twitter posts and achieved an F1 score of 0.91 in the classification phase. Conclusions: Social media can assist with the detection of vaccine safety signals as a valuable complementary source for monitoring mentions of vaccine adverse events. A social media–based VAEM data stream can be assessed for changes to detect possible emerging vaccine safety signals, helping to address the well-recognized limitations of passive reporting systems, including lack of timeliness and underreporting.
KW - immunization
KW - machine learning
KW - natural language processing
KW - social media
KW - Twitter
KW - vaccine adverse effects
KW - vaccine safety
KW - vaccines
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85133073135&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.2196/34305
DO - 10.2196/34305
M3 - Article
C2 - 35708760
AN - SCOPUS:85133073135
SN - 2291-9694
VL - 10
JO - JMIR Medical Informatics
JF - JMIR Medical Informatics
IS - 6
M1 - e34305
ER -