Classifying COVID-19 Vaccine Narratives

Yue Li, Carolina Scarton, Xingyi Song, Kalina Bontcheva


Abstract
Vaccine hesitancy is widespread, despite the government’s information campaigns and the efforts of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Categorising the topics within vaccine-related narratives is crucial to understand the concerns expressed in discussions and identify the specific issues that contribute to vaccine hesitancy. This paper addresses the need for monitoring and analysing vaccine narratives online by introducing a novel vaccine narrative classification task, which categorises COVID-19 vaccine claims into one of seven categories. Following a data augmentation approach, we first construct a novel dataset for this new classification task, focusing on the minority classes. We also make use of fact-checker annotated data. The paper also presents a neural vaccine narrative classifier that achieves an accuracy of 84% under cross-validation. The classifier is publicly available for researchers and journalists.
Anthology ID:
2023.ranlp-1.70
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
648–657
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.70
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Li, Carolina Scarton, Xingyi Song, and Kalina Bontcheva. 2023. Classifying COVID-19 Vaccine Narratives. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 648–657, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Classifying COVID-19 Vaccine Narratives (Li et al., RANLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.70.pdf