COVID-19 Emotion Monitoring as a Tool to Increase Preparedness for Disease Outbreaks in Developing Regions
This work addresses the problem of monitoring mental health repercussions during disease outbreaks for health authorities and private health-insurance companies in developing regions, offering an incremental solution.
This paper developed a Twitter emotion-monitoring system using a state-of-the-art natural language processing model (BETO) to track six different emotions in cities, politicians, and health authorities' Twitter accounts in Colombia during the COVID-19 pandemic. The system aims to help health authorities and private health-insurance companies develop strategies to address mental health issues like suicide and clinical depression.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges, from hospital-occupation management to lock-down mental-health repercussions such as anxiety or depression. In this work, we present a solution for the later problem by developing a Twitter emotion-monitor system based on a state-of-the-art natural-language processing model. The system monitors six different emotions on accounts in cities, as well as politicians and health-authorities Twitter accounts. With an anonymous use of the emotion monitor, health authorities and private health-insurance companies can develop strategies to tackle problems such as suicide and clinical depression. The model chosen for such a task is a Bidirectional-Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) pre-trained on a Spanish corpus (BETO). The model performed well on a validation dataset. The system is deployed online as part of a web application for simulation and data analysis of COVID-19, in Colombia, available at https://epidemiologia-matematica.org.