Streamlining social media information retrieval for public health research with deep learning

Yining Hua, Jiageng Wu, Shixu Lin, Minghui Li, Yujie Zhang, Dinah Foer, Siwen Wang, Peilin Zhou, Jie Yang, Li Zhou

Abstract: Social media-based public health research is crucial for epidemic surveillance, but most studies identify relevant corpora with keyword-matching. This study develops a system to streamline the process of curating colloquial medical dictionaries. We demonstrate the pipeline by curating a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)-colloquial symptom dictionary from COVID-19-related tweets as proof of concept.