@inproceedings{drakesmith-etal-2025-towards,
title = "Towards a Social Media-based Disease Surveillance System for Early Detection of Influenza-like Illnesses: A {T}witter Case Study in Wales",
author = "Drakesmith, Mark and
Antypas, Dimosthenis and
Brown, Clare and
Camacho-Collados, Jose and
Song, Jiao",
editor = "Bak, JinYeong and
Goot, Rob van der and
Jang, Hyeju and
Buaphet, Weerayut and
Ramponi, Alan and
Xu, Wei and
Ritter, Alan",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Noisy and User-generated Text",
month = may,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.wnut-1.1/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.wnut-1.1",
pages = "1--9",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-232-9",
abstract = "Social media offers the potential to provide detection of outbreaks or public health incidents faster than traditional reporting mechanisms. In this paper, we developed and tested a pipeline to produce alerts of influenza-like illness (ILI) using Twitter data. Data was collected from the Twitter API, querying keywords referring to ILI symptoms and geolocated to Wales. Tweets that described first-hand descriptions of symptoms (as opposed to non-personal descriptions) were classified using transformer-based language models specialised on social media (BERTweet and TimeLMs), which were trained on a manually labelled dataset matching the above criteria. After gathering this data, weekly tweet counts were applied to the regression-based Noufaily algorithm to identify exceedances throughout 2022. The algorithm was also applied to counts of ILI-related GP consultations for comparison. Exceedance detection applied to the classified tweet counts produced alerts starting four weeks earlier than by using GP consultation data. These results demonstrate the potential to facilitate advanced preparedness for unexpected increases in healthcare burdens."
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<abstract>Social media offers the potential to provide detection of outbreaks or public health incidents faster than traditional reporting mechanisms. In this paper, we developed and tested a pipeline to produce alerts of influenza-like illness (ILI) using Twitter data. Data was collected from the Twitter API, querying keywords referring to ILI symptoms and geolocated to Wales. Tweets that described first-hand descriptions of symptoms (as opposed to non-personal descriptions) were classified using transformer-based language models specialised on social media (BERTweet and TimeLMs), which were trained on a manually labelled dataset matching the above criteria. After gathering this data, weekly tweet counts were applied to the regression-based Noufaily algorithm to identify exceedances throughout 2022. The algorithm was also applied to counts of ILI-related GP consultations for comparison. Exceedance detection applied to the classified tweet counts produced alerts starting four weeks earlier than by using GP consultation data. These results demonstrate the potential to facilitate advanced preparedness for unexpected increases in healthcare burdens.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Towards a Social Media-based Disease Surveillance System for Early Detection of Influenza-like Illnesses: A Twitter Case Study in Wales
%A Drakesmith, Mark
%A Antypas, Dimosthenis
%A Brown, Clare
%A Camacho-Collados, Jose
%A Song, Jiao
%Y Bak, JinYeong
%Y Goot, Rob van der
%Y Jang, Hyeju
%Y Buaphet, Weerayut
%Y Ramponi, Alan
%Y Xu, Wei
%Y Ritter, Alan
%S Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Noisy and User-generated Text
%D 2025
%8 May
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
%@ 979-8-89176-232-9
%F drakesmith-etal-2025-towards
%X Social media offers the potential to provide detection of outbreaks or public health incidents faster than traditional reporting mechanisms. In this paper, we developed and tested a pipeline to produce alerts of influenza-like illness (ILI) using Twitter data. Data was collected from the Twitter API, querying keywords referring to ILI symptoms and geolocated to Wales. Tweets that described first-hand descriptions of symptoms (as opposed to non-personal descriptions) were classified using transformer-based language models specialised on social media (BERTweet and TimeLMs), which were trained on a manually labelled dataset matching the above criteria. After gathering this data, weekly tweet counts were applied to the regression-based Noufaily algorithm to identify exceedances throughout 2022. The algorithm was also applied to counts of ILI-related GP consultations for comparison. Exceedance detection applied to the classified tweet counts produced alerts starting four weeks earlier than by using GP consultation data. These results demonstrate the potential to facilitate advanced preparedness for unexpected increases in healthcare burdens.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.wnut-1.1
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.wnut-1.1/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.wnut-1.1
%P 1-9
Markdown (Informal)
[Towards a Social Media-based Disease Surveillance System for Early Detection of Influenza-like Illnesses: A Twitter Case Study in Wales](https://aclanthology.org/2025.wnut-1.1/) (Drakesmith et al., WNUT 2025)
ACL