LocalTweets to LocalHealth: A Mental Health Surveillance Framework Based on Twitter Data

Vijeta Deshpande, Minhwa Lee, Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Jason Brian Gibbons, Hong Yu


Abstract
Prior research on Twitter (now X) data has provided positive evidence of its utility in developing supplementary health surveillance systems. In this study, we present a new framework to surveil public health, focusing on mental health (MH) outcomes. We hypothesize that locally posted tweets are indicative of local MH outcomes and collect tweets posted from 765 neighborhoods (census block groups) in the USA. We pair these tweets from each neighborhood with the corresponding MH outcome reported by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to create a benchmark dataset, LocalTweets. With LocalTweets, we present the first population-level evaluation task for Twitter-based MH surveillance systems. We then develop an efficient and effective method, LocalHealth, for predicting MH outcomes based on LocalTweets. When used with GPT3.5, LocalHealth achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy of 0.7429 and 79.78%, respectively, a 59% improvement in F1-score over the GPT3.5 in zero-shot setting. We also utilize LocalHealth to extrapolate CDC’s estimates to proxy unreported neighborhoods, achieving an F1-score of 0.7291. Our work suggests that Twitter data can be effectively leveraged to simulate neighborhood-level MH outcomes.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.936
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
10698–10715
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.936
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vijeta Deshpande, Minhwa Lee, Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Jason Brian Gibbons, and Hong Yu. 2024. LocalTweets to LocalHealth: A Mental Health Surveillance Framework Based on Twitter Data. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 10698–10715, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
LocalTweets to LocalHealth: A Mental Health Surveillance Framework Based on Twitter Data (Deshpande et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.936.pdf