# A Domain-Agnostic Neurosymbolic Approach for Big Social Data Analysis: Evaluating Mental Health Sentiment on Social Media during COVID-19

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07163 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07163/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [K-Adapter: Infusing Knowledge into Pre-Trained Models with Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01808/) (2020)
- [K-BERT: Enabling Language Representation with Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07606/) (2019)
- [Semantic Autoencoder for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08345/) (2017)
- [Knowledge-intensive Language Understanding for Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01174/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Infused Learning (K-IL): Towards Deep Incorporation of Knowledge in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00512/) (2019)
- [Towards Preemptive Detection of Depression and Anxiety in Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05249/) (2020)
- [Identifying Depression on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07384/) (2016)
- [KgPLM: Knowledge-guided Language Model Pre-training via Generative and Discriminative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03551/) (2020)
- [A Large-Scale Dataset of Twitter Chatter about Online Learning during the Current COVID-19 Omicron Wave](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07810/) (2022)
- [Demo Alleviate: Demonstrating Artificial Intelligence Enabled Virtual Assistance for Telehealth: The Mental Health Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00025/) (2023)
- [Implicit Entity Linking in Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08470/) (2017)
- [GEAR-Up: Generative AI and External Knowledge-based Retrieval Upgrading Scholarly Article Searches for Systematic Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09948/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Just KIDDIN: Knowledge Infusion and Distillation for Detection of INdecent Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12174/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Cancer Communication: Evaluating Linguistic Quality, Safety, and Accessibility in Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10472/) (2025)
- [From Reddit to Generative AI: Evaluating Large Language Models for Anxiety Support Fine-tuned on Social Media Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18464/) (2025)
- [From Explainability to Action: A Generative Operational Framework for Integrating XAI in Clinical Mental Health Screening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13828/) (2025)
- [SymLoc: Symbolic Localization of Hallucination across HaluEval and TruthfulQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14172/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monitoring public sentiment via social media is potentially helpful during health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, traditional frequency-based, data-driven neural network-based approaches can miss newly relevant content due to the evolving nature of language in a dynamically evolving environment. Human-curated symbolic knowledge sources, such as lexicons for standard language and slang terms, can potentially elevate social media signals in evolving language. We introduce a neurosymbolic method that integrates neural networks with symbolic knowledge sources, enhancing the detection and interpretation of mental health-related tweets relevant to COVID-19. Our method was evaluated using a corpus of large datasets (approximately 12 billion tweets, 2.5 million subreddit data, and 700k news articles) and multiple knowledge graphs. This method dynamically adapts to evolving language, outperforming purely data-driven models with an F1 score exceeding 92%. This approach also showed faster adaptation to new data and lower computational demands than fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs). This study demonstrates the benefit of neurosymbolic methods in interpreting text in a dynamic environment for tasks such as health surveillance.