COVID-19 Surveillance through Twitter using Self-Supervised Learning and Few Shot Learning

Brandon Lwowski, Peyman Najafirad

Keywords: COVID-19, SelfSupervised Learning, Twitter, Influnza, Few Shot Learning

TL;DR: We propose using few shot learning to fine-tune a semi-supervised model built on unlabeled COVID-19 that can provide in-sights into COVID-19 Tweets that have not been investigated.

Abstract: Public health surveillance and tracking virus via social media can be a useful digital tool for contact tracing and preventing the spread of the virus. Nowadays, large volumes ofCOVID-19 tweets can quickly be processed in real-time to offer information to researchers. Nonetheless, due to the absence of labeled data for COVID-19, the preliminary supervised classifier or semi-supervised self-labeled methods will not handle non-spherical data with adequate accuracy. With the seasonal influenza and novel Coronavirus having many similar symptoms, we propose using few shot learning to fine-tune a semi-supervised model built on unlabeled COVID-19 and previously labeled influenza dataset that can provide in-sights into COVID-19 that have not been investigated. The experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed model with an accuracy of 86%, identification of Covid-19 related discussion using recently collected tweets.