# Revealing COVID-19's Social Dynamics: Diachronic Semantic Analysis of Vaccine and Symptom Discourse on Twitter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08352/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09096/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Alignment of Embeddings with Wasserstein Procrustes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11222/) (2018)
- [COVID-Twitter-BERT: A Natural Language Processing Model to Analyse COVID-19 Content on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07503/) (2020)
- [Analysing Lexical Semantic Change with Contextualised Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14118/) (2020)
- [Statistically Significant Detection of Linguistic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.3315/) (2014)
- [Llama2Vec: Unsupervised Adaptation of Large Language Models for Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15503/) (2023)
- [Cultural Shift or Linguistic Drift? Comparing Two Computational Measures of Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02821/) (2016)
- [Temporal Analysis of Language through Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.3515/) (2014)
- [Time Masking for Temporal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06366/) (2021)
- [METS-CoV: A Dataset of Medical Entity and Targeted Sentiment on COVID-19 Related Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13773/) (2022)
- [Framing COVID-19: How we conceptualize and discuss the pandemic on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06986/) (2020)
- [Causal Modeling of Twitter Activity During COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07952/) (2020)
- [YATO: Yet Another deep learning based Text analysis Open toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13877/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social media is recognized as an important source for deriving insights into public opinion dynamics and social impacts due to the vast textual data generated daily and the 'unconstrained' behavior of people interacting on these platforms. However, such analyses prove challenging due to the semantic shift phenomenon, where word meanings evolve over time. This paper proposes an unsupervised dynamic word embedding method to capture longitudinal semantic shifts in social media data without predefined anchor words. The method leverages word co-occurrence statistics and dynamic updating to adapt embeddings over time, addressing the challenges of data sparseness, imbalanced distributions, and synergistic semantic effects. Evaluated on a large COVID-19 Twitter dataset, the method reveals semantic evolution patterns of vaccine- and symptom-related entities across different pandemic stages, and their potential correlations with real-world statistics. Our key contributions include the dynamic embedding technique, empirical analysis of COVID-19 semantic shifts, and discussions on enhancing semantic shift modeling for computational social science research. This study enables capturing longitudinal semantic dynamics on social media to understand public discourse and collective phenomena.