Machine Learning for Emotion Prediction, Ideology Detection and Polarization Analysis Using COVID-19 Tweets

Abstract

The adversarial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has created a health crisis globally. This unprecedented crisis forced people to lockdown and changed almost every aspect of the regular activities of the people. Thus, the pandemic is also impacting everyone physically, mentally, and economically, and it, therefore, is paramount to analyze and understand emotional responses during the crisis affecting mental health. Negative emotional responses at fine-grained labels like anger and fear during the crisis might also lead to irreversible socio-economic damages. In this talk, the speaker will discuss a neural network model trained using manually labeled data to detect various emotions at fine-grained labels in the Covid-19 tweets automatically. A custom Q&A RoBERTa model to extract phrases from the tweets that are primarily responsible for the corresponding emotions has been designed. None of the existing datasets and work currently provide the selected words or phrases denoting the reason for the corresponding emotions. The speaker will also present a historical emotion analysis using COVID-19 tweets over the USA including each state level analysis. His classification model outperforms other systems and achieves a Jaccard score of 0.6475 with an accuracy of 0.8951. The custom RoBERTa Q&A model outperforms other models by achieving a Jaccard score of 0.7865. Further, he will discuss a deep learning model leveraging the pre-trained BERT-base to detect the political ideology from the tweets for political polarization analysis. The experimental results show a considerable improvement in the accuracy of emotion detection, phrase extraction, and ideology detection when they use emotion as a feature.

About the Speaker

Prof. Sanjay K. Madria earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1995. He was on the faculty of the University Science Malaysia, Nanyang Technological University and Purdue University prior to joining the University of Missouri-Rolla (now renamed to Missouri University of Science and Technology) in 2000. He is currently the Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science there.

Prof. Madria's research interests lie in the areas of Big Data, Data Analytics, Blockchain, Mobile Computing, Databases, and Cyber Security. He has published over 290 Journal and conference papers and is a co-author of a book on Secure Sensor Cloud. He also serves as the Associate Editor of Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal and Knowledge and Information Systems.

Prof. Madria has been awarded the Invitational Fellowship for Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Fellowship from the American Society of Engineering Education and NRC Fellowship from the US National Academies. He is also an IEEE Senior Member as well as an IEEE Golden Core Awardee.

For Attendees' Attention

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