Zika discourse in the Americas: A multilingual topic analysis of Twitter
Abstract
Article Authors Metrics Comments Media Coverage Abstract Introduction Materials and methods Results Discussion Acknowledgments References Reader Comments (0) Media Coverage (0) Figures Abstract This work examines Twitter discussion surrounding the 2015 outbreak of Zika, a virus that is most often mild but has been associated with serious birth defects and neurological syndromes. We introduce and analyze a collection of 3.9 million tweets mentioning Zika geolocated to North and South America, where the virus is most prevalent. Using a multilingual topic model, we automatically identify and extract the key topics of discussion across the dataset in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. We examine the variation in Twitter activity across time and location, finding that rises in activity tend to follow to major events, and geographic rates of Zika-related discussion are moderately correlated with Zika incidence (ρ = .398).
- Authors:
-
[2];
[3];
- Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA (United States)
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States)
- Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1526952
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-18-25885
Journal ID: ISSN 1932-6203
- Grant/Contract Number:
- 89233218CNA000001
- Resource Type:
- Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- PLoS ONE
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 14; Journal Issue: 5; Journal ID: ISSN 1932-6203
- Publisher:
- Public Library of Science
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES; Biological Science; Information Science
Citation Formats
Pruss, Dasha, Daughton, Ashlynn Rae, Paul, Michael J., Fujinuma, Yoshinari, Arnot, Brad, Szafir, Danielle Albers, and Boyd-Graber, Jordan. Zika discourse in the Americas: A multilingual topic analysis of Twitter. United States: N. p., 2019.
Web. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0216922.
Pruss, Dasha, Daughton, Ashlynn Rae, Paul, Michael J., Fujinuma, Yoshinari, Arnot, Brad, Szafir, Danielle Albers, & Boyd-Graber, Jordan. Zika discourse in the Americas: A multilingual topic analysis of Twitter. United States. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216922
Pruss, Dasha, Daughton, Ashlynn Rae, Paul, Michael J., Fujinuma, Yoshinari, Arnot, Brad, Szafir, Danielle Albers, and Boyd-Graber, Jordan. Thu .
"Zika discourse in the Americas: A multilingual topic analysis of Twitter". United States. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216922. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1526952.
@article{osti_1526952,
title = {Zika discourse in the Americas: A multilingual topic analysis of Twitter},
author = {Pruss, Dasha and Daughton, Ashlynn Rae and Paul, Michael J. and Fujinuma, Yoshinari and Arnot, Brad and Szafir, Danielle Albers and Boyd-Graber, Jordan},
abstractNote = {Article Authors Metrics Comments Media Coverage Abstract Introduction Materials and methods Results Discussion Acknowledgments References Reader Comments (0) Media Coverage (0) Figures Abstract This work examines Twitter discussion surrounding the 2015 outbreak of Zika, a virus that is most often mild but has been associated with serious birth defects and neurological syndromes. We introduce and analyze a collection of 3.9 million tweets mentioning Zika geolocated to North and South America, where the virus is most prevalent. Using a multilingual topic model, we automatically identify and extract the key topics of discussion across the dataset in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. We examine the variation in Twitter activity across time and location, finding that rises in activity tend to follow to major events, and geographic rates of Zika-related discussion are moderately correlated with Zika incidence (ρ = .398).},
doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0216922},
journal = {PLoS ONE},
number = 5,
volume = 14,
place = {United States},
year = {Thu May 23 00:00:00 EDT 2019},
month = {Thu May 23 00:00:00 EDT 2019}
}
Free Publicly Available Full Text
Publisher's Version of Record
Other availability
Search WorldCat to find libraries that may hold this journal
Cited by: 20 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science
Web of Science
Figures / Tables:
Table 1: The number of tweets from each country or territory in our Americas dataset, along with the percentage in each language.
All figures and tables
(8 total)
Save to My Library
You must Sign In or Create an Account in order to save documents to your library.
Works referenced in this record:
Early Assessment of Anxiety and Behavioral Response to Novel Swine-Origin Influenza A(H1N1)
journal, December 2009
- Jones, James Holland; Salathé, Marcel
- PLoS ONE, Vol. 4, Issue 12
Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics
journal, January 2015
- Lucas, Christopher; Nielsen, Richard A.; Roberts, Margaret E.
- Political Analysis, Vol. 23, Issue 2
Early Assessment of Anxiety and Behavioral Response to Novel Swine-Origin Influenza A(H1N1)
journal, December 2009
- Jones, James Holland; Salathé, Marcel
- PLoS ONE, Vol. 4, Issue 12
Combining Search, Social Media, and Traditional Data Sources to Improve Influenza Surveillance
journal, October 2015
- Santillana, Mauricio; Nguyen, André T.; Dredze, Mark
- PLOS Computational Biology, Vol. 11, Issue 10
Zika tweets and topics (2015-03-01 to 2016-10-31)
dataset, January 2019
- Pruss, Dasha; Fujinuma, Yoshinari; Daughton, Ashlynn
- figshare
A large-scale quantitative analysis of latent factors and sentiment in online doctor reviews
journal, November 2014
- Wallace, Byron C.; Paul, Michael J.; Sarkar, Urmimala
- Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Vol. 21, Issue 6
What are we ‘tweeting’ about obesity? Mapping tweets with topic modeling and Geographic Information System
journal, March 2013
- Ghosh, Debarchana (Debs); Guha, Rajarshi
- Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Vol. 40, Issue 2
The Effect of Population and "Structural" Biases on Social Media-based Algorithms: A Case Study in Geolocation Inference Across the Urban-Rural Spectrum
conference, January 2017
- Johnson, Isaac; McMahon, Connor; Schöning, Johannes
- Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '17
Possible Association Between Zika Virus Infection and Microcephaly — Brazil, 2015
journal, January 2016
- Schuler-Faccini, Lavinia; Ribeiro, Erlane M.; Feitosa, Ian M. L.
- MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 65, Issue 3
Virtual Zika transmission after the first U.S. case: who said what and how it spread on Twitter
journal, May 2018
- Vijaykumar, Santosh; Nowak, Glen; Himelboim, Itai
- American Journal of Infection Control, Vol. 46, Issue 5
Forecasting Zika Incidence in the 2016 Latin America Outbreak Combining Traditional Disease Surveillance with Search, Social Media, and News Report Data
journal, January 2017
- McGough, Sarah F.; Brownstein, John S.; Hawkins, Jared B.
- PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, Vol. 11, Issue 1
Polylingual topic models
conference, January 2009
- Mimno, David; Wallach, Hanna M.; Naradowsky, Jason
- Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Volume 2 - EMNLP '09
Mass Media and the Contagion of Fear: The Case of Ebola in America
journal, June 2015
- Towers, Sherry; Afzal, Shehzad; Bernal, Gilbert
- PLOS ONE, Vol. 10, Issue 6
Applications of Topic Models
journal, January 2017
- Boyd-Graber, Jordan; Hu, Yuening; Mimno, David
- Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval, Vol. 11, Issue 2-3
Cheap Translation for Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition
conference, January 2017
- Mayhew, Stephen; Tsai, Chen-Tse; Roth, Dan
- Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Disease Detection or Public Opinion Reflection? Content Analysis of Tweets, Other Social Media, and Online Newspapers During the Measles Outbreak in the Netherlands in 2013
journal, January 2015
- Mollema, Liesbeth; Harmsen, Irene Anhai; Broekhuizen, Emma
- Journal of Medical Internet Research, Vol. 17, Issue 5
Mining multilingual topics from wikipedia
conference, January 2009
- Ni, Xiaochuan; Sun, Jian-Tao; Hu, Jian
- Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web - WWW '09
Zika Virus Infection With Prolonged Maternal Viremia and Fetal Brain Abnormalities
journal, March 2017
- Driggers, R. W.; Ho, C. -Y.; Korhonen, E. M.
- Obstetric Anesthesia Digest, Vol. 37, Issue 1
Possible Association Between Zika Virus Infection and Microcephaly — Brazil, 2015
journal, January 2016
- Schuler-Faccini, Lavinia; Ribeiro, Erlane M.; Feitosa, Ian M. L.
- MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 65, Issue 3
Forecasting Zika Incidence in the 2016 Latin America Outbreak Combining Traditional Disease Surveillance with Search, Social Media, and News Report Data
journal, January 2017
- McGough, Sarah F.; Brownstein, John S.; Hawkins, Jared B.
- PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, Vol. 11, Issue 1
Combining Search, Social Media, and Traditional Data Sources to Improve Influenza Surveillance
text, January 2015
- Santillana, Mauricio; Nguyen, Andre T.; Dredze, Mark
- arXiv
Computer-Assisted Keyword and Document Set Discovery from Unstructured Text: KEYWORD AND DOCUMENT SET DISCOVERY
journal, April 2017
- King, Gary; Lam, Patrick; Roberts, Margaret E.
- American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 61, Issue 4
Detecting themes of public concern: A text mining analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Ebola live Twitter chat
journal, October 2015
- Lazard, Allison J.; Scheinfeld, Emily; Bernhardt, Jay M.
- American Journal of Infection Control, Vol. 43, Issue 10
Redundancy-Aware Topic Modeling for Patient Record Notes
text, January 2014
- Cohen, Raphael; Aviram, Iddo; Elhadad, Michael
- Columbia University
E-Cigarette Surveillance With Social Media Data: Social Bots, Emerging Topics, and Trends
journal, January 2017
- Allem, Jon-Patrick; Ferrara, Emilio; Uppu, Sree Priyanka
- JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Vol. 3, Issue 4
What Are People Tweeting About Zika? An Exploratory Study Concerning Its Symptoms, Treatment, Transmission, and Prevention
journal, January 2017
- Miller, Michele; Banerjee, Tanvi; Muppalla, Roopteja
- JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Vol. 3, Issue 2
The spread of awareness and its impact on epidemic outbreaks
journal, March 2009
- Funk, S.; Gilad, E.; Watkins, C.
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, Issue 16
#Healthy Selfies: Exploration of Health Topics on Instagram
journal, January 2018
- Muralidhara, Sachin; Paul, Michael J.
- JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Vol. 4, Issue 2
Possible Association Between Zika Virus Infection and Microcephaly — Brazil, 2015
journal, January 2016
- Schuler-Faccini, Lavinia; Ribeiro, Erlane M.; Feitosa, Ian M. L.
- MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 65, Issue 3
Probabilistic topic models
journal, April 2012
- Blei, David M.
- Communications of the ACM, Vol. 55, Issue 4
Geographic Maldistribution of Primary Care for Children
journal, January 2012
- Stockman, J. A.
- Yearbook of Pediatrics, Vol. 2012
Probabilistic topic models
conference, January 2011
- Blei, David
- Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference Tutorials on - KDD '11 Tutorials
Zika in Twitter: Temporal Variations of Locations, Actors, and Concepts
journal, January 2017
- Stefanidis, Anthony; Vraga, Emily; Lamprianidis, Georgios
- JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Vol. 3, Issue 2
The eMERGE Network: A consortium of biorepositories linked to electronic medical records data for conducting genomic studies
journal, January 2011
- McCarty, Catherine A.; Chisholm, Rex L.; Chute, Christopher G.
- BMC Medical Genomics, Vol. 4, Issue 1
Monitoring Public Health Concerns Using Twitter Sentiment Classifications
conference, September 2013
- Ji, Xiang; Chun, Soon Ae; Geller, James
- 2013 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI)
What are we ‘tweeting’ about obesity? Mapping tweets with topic modeling and Geographic Information System
journal, March 2013
- Ghosh, Debarchana (Debs); Guha, Rajarshi
- Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Vol. 40, Issue 2
Redundancy-Aware Topic Modeling for Patient Record Notes
journal, February 2014
- Cohen, Raphael; Aviram, Iddo; Elhadad, Michael
- PLoS ONE, Vol. 9, Issue 2
Redundancy-Aware Topic Modeling for Patient Record Notes
journal, February 2014
- Cohen, Raphael; Aviram, Iddo; Elhadad, Michael
- PLoS ONE, Vol. 9, Issue 2
Global reaction to the recent outbreaks of Zika virus: Insights from a Big Data analysis
journal, September 2017
- Bragazzi, Nicola Luigi; Alicino, Cristiano; Trucchi, Cecilia
- PLOS ONE, Vol. 12, Issue 9
Risk perception and the media
journal, January 2000
- Wahlberg, Anders A. F.; Sjoberg, Lennart
- Journal of Risk Research, Vol. 3, Issue 1
Zika tweets and topics (2015-03-01 to 2016-10-31)
dataset, January 2019
- Pruss, Dasha; Fujinuma, Yoshinari; Daughton, Ashlynn
- figshare
Comparing Apples to Apple: The Effects of Stemmers on Topic Models
journal, December 2016
- Schofield, Alexandra; Mimno, David
- Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 4
Empirical study of topic modeling in Twitter
conference, January 2010
- Hong, Liangjie; Davison, Brian D.
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Media Analytics - SOMA '10
Discovering Health Topics in Social Media Using Topic Models
journal, August 2014
- Paul, Michael J.; Dredze, Mark
- PLoS ONE, Vol. 9, Issue 8
The eMERGE Network: A consortium of biorepositories linked to electronic medical records data for conducting genomic studies
journal, January 2011
- McCarty, Catherine A.; Chisholm, Rex L.; Chute, Christopher G.
- BMC Medical Genomics, Vol. 4, Issue 1
Effective vaccine communication during the disneyland measles outbreak
journal, June 2016
- Broniatowski, David A.; Hilyard, Karen M.; Dredze, Mark
- Vaccine, Vol. 34, Issue 28
Risk perception and the media
journal, January 2000
- Wahlberg, Anders A. F.; Sjoberg, Lennart
- Journal of Risk Research, Vol. 3, Issue 1
Comparing grounded theory and topic modeling: Extreme divergence or unlikely convergence?
journal, April 2017
- Baumer, Eric P. S.; Mimno, David; Guha, Shion
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 68, Issue 6
Geographic Maldistribution of Primary Care for Children
journal, December 2010
- Shipman, S. A.; Lan, J.; Chang, C. -h.
- PEDIATRICS, Vol. 127, Issue 1
Global reaction to the recent outbreaks of Zika virus: Insights from a Big Data analysis
journal, September 2017
- Bragazzi, Nicola Luigi; Alicino, Cristiano; Trucchi, Cecilia
- PLOS ONE, Vol. 12, Issue 9
Comparing Apples to Apple: The Effects of Stemmers on Topic Models
journal, December 2016
- Schofield, Alexandra; Mimno, David
- Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 4
Comparing grounded theory and topic modeling: Extreme divergence or unlikely convergence?
journal, April 2017
- Baumer, Eric P. S.; Mimno, David; Guha, Shion
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 68, Issue 6
Geographic Maldistribution of Primary Care for Children
journal, December 2010
- Shipman, S. A.; Lan, J.; Chang, C. -h.
- PEDIATRICS, Vol. 127, Issue 1
Investigating task performance of probabilistic topic models: an empirical study of PLSA and LDA
journal, August 2010
- Lu, Yue; Mei, Qiaozhu; Zhai, ChengXiang
- Information Retrieval, Vol. 14, Issue 2
Discovering Health Topics in Social Media Using Topic Models
journal, August 2014
- Paul, Michael J.; Dredze, Mark
- PLoS ONE, Vol. 9, Issue 8
Statistical machine translation
journal, August 2008
- Lopez, Adam
- ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 40, Issue 3
Twitter Improves Influenza Forecasting
journal, January 2014
- Paul, Michael J.; Dredze, Mark; Broniatowski, David
- PLoS Currents
Social media for large studies of behavior
journal, November 2014
- Ruths, Derek; Pfeffer, Jürgen
- Science, Vol. 346, Issue 6213
Flu Gone Viral: Syndromic Surveillance of Flu on Twitter Using Temporal Topic Models
conference, December 2014
- Chen, Liangzhe; Hossain, K. S. M. Tozammel; Butler, Patrick
- 2014 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)
Group chats on Twitter
conference, January 2013
- Cook, James; Kenthapadi, Krishnaram; Mishra, Nina
- Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web - WWW '13
What makes people talk about Ebola on social media? A retrospective analysis of Twitter use
journal, January 2015
- Rodriguez-Morales, Alfonso J.; Castañeda-Hernández, Diana Milena; McGregor, Alastair
- Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, Vol. 13, Issue 1
Dictionary-based techniques for cross-language information retrieval
journal, May 2005
- Levow, Gina-Anne; Oard, Douglas W.; Resnik, Philip
- Information Processing & Management, Vol. 41, Issue 3
Dictionary-based techniques for cross-language information retrieval
journal, May 2005
- Levow, Gina-Anne; Oard, Douglas W.; Resnik, Philip
- Information Processing & Management, Vol. 41, Issue 3
What Are People Tweeting About Zika? An Exploratory Study Concerning Its Symptoms, Treatment, Transmission, and Prevention
journal, January 2017
- Miller, Michele; Banerjee, Tanvi; Muppalla, Roopteja
- JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Vol. 3, Issue 2
The spread of awareness and its impact on epidemic outbreaks
journal, March 2009
- Funk, S.; Gilad, E.; Watkins, C.
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, Issue 16
Applications of Topic Models
journal, January 2017
- Boyd-Graber, Jordan; Hu, Yuening; Mimno, David
- Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval, Vol. 11, Issue 2-3
Zika in Twitter: Temporal Variations of Locations, Actors, and Concepts
journal, January 2017
- Stefanidis, Anthony; Vraga, Emily; Lamprianidis, Georgios
- JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Vol. 3, Issue 2
Disease Detection or Public Opinion Reflection? Content Analysis of Tweets, Other Social Media, and Online Newspapers During the Measles Outbreak in the Netherlands in 2013
journal, January 2015
- Mollema, Liesbeth; Harmsen, Irene Anhai; Broekhuizen, Emma
- Journal of Medical Internet Research, Vol. 17, Issue 5
A Literature Review of Zika Virus
journal, July 2016
- Plourde, Anna R.; Bloch, Evan M.
- Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol. 22, Issue 7
Computer-Assisted Keyword and Document Set Discovery from Unstructured Text: KEYWORD AND DOCUMENT SET DISCOVERY
journal, April 2017
- King, Gary; Lam, Patrick; Roberts, Margaret E.
- American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 61, Issue 4
Combining Search, Social Media, and Traditional Data Sources to Improve Influenza Surveillance
journal, October 2015
- Santillana, Mauricio; Nguyen, André T.; Dredze, Mark
- PLOS Computational Biology, Vol. 11, Issue 10
Machine Reading Tea Leaves: Automatically Evaluating Topic Coherence and Topic Model Quality
conference, January 2014
- Lau, Jey Han; Newman, David; Baldwin, Timothy
- Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Investigating task performance of probabilistic topic models: an empirical study of PLSA and LDA
journal, August 2010
- Lu, Yue; Mei, Qiaozhu; Zhai, ChengXiang
- Information Retrieval, Vol. 14, Issue 2
Zika Virus Infection with Prolonged Maternal Viremia and Fetal Brain Abnormalities
journal, June 2016
- Driggers, Rita W.; Ho, Cheng-Ying; Korhonen, Essi M.
- New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 374, Issue 22
#Healthy Selfies: Exploration of Health Topics on Instagram
journal, January 2018
- Muralidhara, Sachin; Paul, Michael J.
- JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Vol. 4, Issue 2
Diagnosing and Improving Topic Models by Analyzing Posterior Variability
journal, April 2018
- Xing, Linzi; Paul, Michael
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 32, Issue 1
Works referencing / citing this record:
Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere
journal, April 2021
- Rauchfleisch, Adrian; Vogler, Daniel; Eisenegger, Mark
- Javnost - The Public, Vol. 28, Issue 2
Figures / Tables found in this record:
Figures/Tables have been extracted from DOE-funded journal article accepted manuscripts.