Vaccine attitude surveillance using semantic analysis: constructing a semantically annotated corpus

Stephanie Brien, Nona Naderi, Arash Shaban-Nejad, Luke Mondor, Doerthe Kroemker, David L. Buckeridge

Abstract: This paper reports work in progress to semantically annotate blog posts about vaccines to use in the Vaccine Attitude Surveillance using Semantic Analysis (VASSA) framework. The VASSA framework combines semantic web and natural language processing (NLP) tools and techniques to provide a coherent semantic layer across online social media for assessment and analysis of vaccination attitudes and beliefs. We describe how the blog posts were sampled and selected, our schema to semantically annotate concepts defined in our ontology, details of the annotation process, and inter-annotator agreement on a sample of blog posts.