AI model detects people's attitudes towards vaccines from their social media posts
People’s attitudes towards vaccines can now be detected from their social media posts with a smart AI model, developed by researchers at the University of Warwick. An AI-based model can analyze social media posts and determine the author’s attitude towards vaccines, by being ‘trained’ to recognize that attitude from a small number of sample tweets. As a simple example, if a post contains mention of distrust of health care institutions, fear of needles, or something related to a known conspiracy theory, the model can recognize that the person who wrote it may have negative feelings about vaccinations. The research, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will be presented today (12 July) at the North American Association of Computational Linguistics Annual Conference 2022. It is led by Professor Yulan He from the University’s Department of Computer Science, supported by a 5-year Turing AI Fellowship funded by the EPSRC. Professor He and his colleagues at the University of Warwick h