Five Years of COVID-19 Discourse on Instagram: A Labeled Instagram Dataset of Over Half a Million Posts for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

The work presented in this paper makes three scientific contributions with a specific focus on mining and analysis of COVID-19-related posts on Instagram. First, it presents a multilingual dataset of 500,153 Instagram posts about COVID-19 published between January 2020 and September 2024. This dataset, available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/d46p-v480, contains Instagram posts in 161 different languages as well as 535,021 distinct hashtags. After the development of this dataset, multilingual sentiment analysis was performed, which involved classifying each post as positive, negative, or neutral. The results of sentiment analysis are presented as a separate attribute in this dataset. Second, it presents the results of performing sentiment analysis per year from 2020 to 2024. The findings revealed the trends in sentiment related to COVID-19 on Instagram since the beginning of the pandemic. For instance, between 2020 and 2024, the sentiment trends show a notable shift, with positive sentiment decreasing from 38.35% to 28.69%, while neutral sentiment rising from 44.19% to 58.34%. Finally, the paper also presents findings of language-specific sentiment analysis. This analysis highlighted similar and contrasting trends of sentiment across posts published in different languages on Instagram. For instance, out of all English posts, 49.68% were positive, 14.84% were negative, and 35.48% were neutral. In contrast, among Hindi posts, 4.40% were positive, 57.04% were negative, and 38.56% were neutral, reflecting distinct differences in the sentiment distribution between these two languages.

Mpox Narrative on Instagram: A Labeled Multilingual Dataset of Instagram Posts on Mpox for Sentiment, Hate Speech, and Anxiety Analysis

The world is currently experiencing an outbreak of mpox, which has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by WHO. No prior work related to social media mining has focused on the development of a dataset of Instagram posts about the mpox outbreak. The work presented in this paper aims to address this research gap and makes two scientific contributions to this field. First, it presents a multilingual dataset of 60,127 Instagram posts about mpox, published between July 23, 2022, and September 5, 2024. The dataset, available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/7fvc-y093, contains Instagram posts about mpox in 52 languages. For each of these posts, the Post ID, Post Description, Date of publication, language, and translated version of the post (translation to English was performed using the Google Translate API) are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, and anxiety or stress detection were performed. This process included classifying each post into (i) one of the sentiment classes, i.e., fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral, (ii) hate or not hate, and (iii) anxiety/stress detected or no anxiety/stress detected. These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. Second, this paper presents the results of performing sentiment analysis, hate speech analysis, and anxiety or stress analysis. The variation of the sentiment classes - fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, and neutral were observed to be 27.95%, 2.57%, 8.69%, 5.94%, 2.69%, 1.53%, and 50.64%, respectively. In terms of hate speech detection, 95.75% of the posts did not contain hate and the remaining 4.25% of the posts contained hate. Finally, 72.05% of the posts did not indicate any anxiety/stress, and the remaining 27.95% of the posts represented some form of anxiety/stress.

A Labelled Dataset for Sentiment Analysis of Videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Other Sources about the 2024 Outbreak of Measles

The work of this paper presents a dataset that contains the data of 4011 videos about the ongoing outbreak of measles published on 264 websites on the internet between January 1, 2024, and May 31, 2024. The dataset is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/40s8-xf63. These websites primarily include YouTube and TikTok, which account for 48.6% and 15.2% of the videos, respectively. The remainder of the websites include Instagram and Facebook as well as the websites of various global and local news organizations. For each of these videos, the URL of the video, title of the post, description of the post, and the date of publication of the video are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis (using VADER), subjectivity analysis (using TextBlob), and fine-grain sentiment analysis (using DistilRoBERTa-base) of the video titles and video descriptions were performed. This included classifying each video title and video description into (i) one of the sentiment classes i.e. positive, negative, or neutral, (ii) one of the subjectivity classes i.e. highly opinionated, neutral opinionated, or least opinionated, and (iii) one of the fine-grain sentiment classes i.e. fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral. These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset for the training and testing of machine learning algorithms for performing sentiment analysis or subjectivity analysis in this field as well as for other applications. Finally, this paper also presents a list of open research questions that may be investigated using this dataset.

Analyzing Public Reactions, Perceptions, and Attitudes during the MPox Outbreak: Findings from Topic Modeling of Tweets

The recent outbreak of the MPox virus has resulted in a tremendous increase in the usage of Twitter. Prior works in this area of research have primarily focused on the sentiment analysis and content analysis of these Tweets, and the few works that have focused on topic modeling have multiple limitations. This paper aims to address this research gap and makes two scientific contributions to this field. First, it presents the results of performing Topic Modeling on 601,432 Tweets about the 2022 Mpox outbreak that were posted on Twitter between 7 May 2022 and 3 March 2023. The results indicate that the conversations on Twitter related to Mpox during this time range may be broadly categorized into four distinct themes - Views and Perspectives about Mpox, Updates on Cases and Investigations about Mpox, Mpox and the LGBTQIA+ Community, and Mpox and COVID-19. Second, the paper presents the findings from the analysis of these Tweets. The results show that the theme that was most popular on Twitter (in terms of the number of Tweets posted) during this time range was Views and Perspectives about Mpox. This was followed by the theme of Mpox and the LGBTQIA+ Community, which was followed by the themes of Mpox and COVID-19 and Updates on Cases and Investigations about Mpox, respectively. Finally, a comparison with related studies in this area of research is also presented to highlight the novelty and significance of this research work.

Sentiment Analysis and Text Analysis of the Public Discourse on Twitter about COVID-19 and MPox

Mining and analysis of the big data of Twitter conversations have been of significant interest to the scientific community in the fields of healthcare, epidemiology, big data, data science, computer science, and their related areas, as can be seen from several works in the last few years that focused on sentiment analysis and other forms of text analysis of tweets related to Ebola, E-Coli, Dengue, Human Papillomavirus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Measles, Zika virus, H1N1, influenza like illness, swine flu, flu, Cholera, Listeriosis, cancer, Liver Disease, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, kidney disease, lupus, Parkinsons, Diphtheria, and West Nile virus. The recent outbreaks of COVID-19 and MPox have served as catalysts for Twitter usage related to seeking and sharing information, views, opinions, and sentiments involving both of these viruses. None of the prior works in this field analyzed tweets focusing on both COVID-19 and MPox simultaneously. To address this research gap, a total of 61,862 tweets that focused on MPox and COVID-19 simultaneously, posted between 7 May 2022 and 3 March 2023, were studied. The findings and contributions of this study are manifold. First, the results of sentiment analysis using the VADER approach show that nearly half the tweets had a negative sentiment. It was followed by tweets that had a positive sentiment and tweets that had a neutral sentiment, respectively. Second, this paper presents the top 50 hashtags used in these tweets. Third, it presents the top 100 most frequently used words in these tweets after performing tokenization, removal of stopwords, and word frequency analysis. Finally, a comprehensive comparative study that compares the contributions of this paper with 49 prior works in this field is presented to further uphold the relevance and novelty of this work.

A Simplistic and Cost-Effective Design for Real-World Development of an Ambient Assisted Living System for Fall Detection and Indoor Localization: Proof of Concept

Falls, highly common in the constantly increasing global aging population, can have a variety of negative effects on their health, well-being, and quality of life, including restricting their capabilities to conduct Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), which are crucial for one's sustenance. Timely assistance during falls is highly necessary, which involves tracking the indoor location of the elderly during their diverse navigational patterns associated with ADLs to detect the precise location of a fall. With the decreasing caregiver population on a global scale, it is important that the future of intelligent living environments can detect falls during ADLs while being able to track the indoor location of the elderly in the real world. To address these challenges, this work proposes a cost-effective and simplistic design paradigm for an Ambient Assisted Living system that can capture multimodal components of user behaviors during ADLs that are necessary for performing fall detection and indoor localization in a simultaneous manner in the real world. Proof of concept results from real-world experiments are presented to uphold the effective working of the system. The findings from two comparison studies with prior works in this field are also presented to uphold the novelty of this work. The first comparison study shows how the proposed system outperforms prior works in the areas of indoor localization and fall detection in terms of the effectiveness of its software design and hardware design. The second comparison study shows that the cost for the development of this system is the least as compared to prior works in these fields, which involved real-world development of the underlining systems, thereby upholding its cost-effective nature.

Indoor Localization for Personalized Ambient Assisted Living of Multiple Users in Multi-Floor Smart Environments

This paper presents a multifunctional interdisciplinary framework that makes four scientific contributions towards the development of personalized ambient assisted living, with a specific focus to address the different and dynamic needs of the diverse aging population in the future of smart living environments. First, it presents a probabilistic reasoning-based mathematical approach to model all possible forms of user interactions for any activity arising from the user diversity of multiple users in such environments. Second, it presents a system that uses this approach with a machine learning method to model individual user profiles and user-specific user interactions for detecting the dynamic indoor location of each specific user. Third, to address the need to develop highly accurate indoor localization systems for increased trust, reliance, and seamless user acceptance, the framework introduces a novel methodology where two boosting approaches Gradient Boosting and the AdaBoost algorithm are integrated and used on a decision tree-based learning model to perform indoor localization. Fourth, the framework introduces two novel functionalities to provide semantic context to indoor localization in terms of detecting each user's floor-specific location as well as tracking whether a specific user was located inside or outside a given spatial region in a multi-floor-based indoor setting. These novel functionalities of the proposed framework were tested on a dataset of localization-related Big Data collected from 18 different users who navigated in 3 buildings consisting of 5 floors and 254 indoor spatial regions. The results show that this approach of indoor localization for personalized AAL that models each specific user always achieves higher accuracy as compared to the traditional approach of modeling an average user.

Investigating the impact of COVID-19 on Online Learning-based Web Behavior

COVID-19, a pandemic that the world has not seen in decades, has resulted in presenting a multitude of unprecedented challenges for student learning across the globe. The global surge in COVID-19 cases resulted in several schools, colleges, and universities closing in 2020 in almost all parts of the world and switching to online or remote learning, which has impacted student learning in different ways. This has resulted in both educators and students spending more time on the internet than ever before, which may be broadly summarized as both these groups investigating, learning, and familiarizing themselves with information, tools, applications, and frameworks to adapt to online learning. This paper takes an explorative approach to further investigate and analyze the impact of COVID-19 on such web behavior data related to online learning to interpret the associated interests, challenges, and needs. The study specifically focused on investigating Google Search-based web behavior data as Google is the most popular search engine globally. The impact of COVID-19 related to online learning-based web behavior on Google was studied for the top 20 worst affected countries in terms of the total number of COVID-19 cases, and the findings have been published as an open-access dataset. Furthermore, to interpret the trends in web behavior data related to online learning, the paper discusses a case study in terms of the impact of COVID-19 on the education system of one of these countries.

Trends in Remote Learning-based Google Shopping in the United States due to COVID-19

The United States of America has been the worst affected country in terms of the number of cases and deaths on account of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) or COVID-19, a highly transmissible and pathogenic coronavirus that started spreading globally in late 2019. On account of the surge of infections, accompanied by hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19, and lack of a definitive cure at that point, a national emergency was declared in the United States on March 13, 2020. To prevent the rapid spread of the virus, several states declared stay at home and remote work guidelines shortly after this declaration of an emergency. Such guidelines caused schools, colleges, and universities, both private and public, in all the 50-United States to switch to remote or online forms of teaching for a significant period of time. As a result, Google, the most widely used search engine in the United States, experienced a surge in online shopping of remote learning-based software, systems, applications, and gadgets by both educators and students from all the 50-United States, due to both these groups responding to the associated needs and demands related to switching to remote teaching and learning. This paper aims to investigate, analyze, and interpret these trends of Google Shopping related to remote learning that emerged since March 13, 2020, on account of COVID-19 and the subsequent remote learning adoption in almost all schools, colleges, and universities, from all the 50-United States. The study was performed using Google Trends, which helps to track and study Google Shopping-based online activity emerging from different geolocations. The results and discussions show that the highest interest related to Remote Learning-based Google Shopping was recorded from Oregon, which was followed by Illinois, Florida, Texas, California, and the other states.

Investigating the Emergence of Online Learning in Different Countries using the 5 W's and 1 H Approach

The rise of the Internet of Everything lifestyle in the last decade has had a significant impact on the increased emergence and adoption of online learning in almost all countries across the world. E-learning 3.0 is expected to become the norm of learning globally in almost all sectors in the next few years. The pervasiveness of the Semantic Web powered by the Internet of Everything lifestyle is expected to play a huge role towards seamless and faster adoption of the emerging paradigms of E-learning 3.0. Therefore, this paper presents an exploratory study to analyze multimodal components of Semantic Web behavior data to investigate the emergence of online learning in different countries across the world. The work specifically involved investigating relevant web behavior data to interpret the 5 W's and 1 H - Who, What, When Where, Why, and How related to online learning. Based on studying the E-learning Index of 2021, the study was performed for all the countries that are member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The results presented and discussed help to interpret the emergence of online learning in each of these countries in terms of the associated public perceptions, queries, opinions, behaviors, and perspectives. Furthermore, to support research and development in this field, we have published the web behavior-based Big Data related to online learning that was mined for all these 38 countries, in the form of a dataset, which is avail-able at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/xbvs-0198.