In this work, we study English-language vaccine discourse in social media posts, specifically posts on X (formerly Twitter), in seven years before the COVID-19 outbreak (2013 to 2019) and three years after the outbreak was first reported (2020 to 2022). Drawing on theories from social cognition and the stereotype content model in Social Psychology, we analyze how English speakers talk about vaccines on social media to understand the evolving narrative around vaccines in social media posts. To do that, we first introduce a novel dataset comprising 18.7 million curated posts on vaccine discourse from 2013 to 2022. This extensive collection-filtered down from an initial 129 million posts through rigorous preprocessing-captures both pre-COVID and COVID-19 periods, offering valuable insights into the evolution of English-speaking X users' perceptions related to vaccines. Our analysis shows that the COVID-19 pandemic led to complex shifts in X users' sentiment and discourse around vaccines. We observe that negative emotion word usage decreased during the pandemic, with notable rises in usage of surprise, and trust related emotion words. Furthermore, vaccine-related language tended to use more warmth-focused words associated with trustworthiness, along with positive, competence-focused words during the early days of the pandemic, with a marked rise in negative word usage towards the end of the pandemic, possibly reflecting a growing vaccine hesitancy and skepticism.

Social media platforms such as Twitter (now X) provide rich data for analyzing public discourse, especially during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the brevity, informality, and noise of social media short texts often hinder the effectiveness of traditional topic modeling, producing incoherent or redundant topics that are often difficult to interpret. To address these challenges, we have developed \emph{TM-Rephrase}, a model-agnostic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to rephrase raw tweets into more standardized and formal language prior to topic modeling. Using a dataset of 25,027 COVID-19-related Twitter posts, we investigate the effects of two rephrasing strategies, general- and colloquial-to-formal-rephrasing, on multiple topic modeling methods. Results demonstrate that \emph{TM-Rephrase} improves three metrics measuring topic modeling performance (i.e., topic coherence, topic uniqueness, and topic diversity) while reducing topic redundancy of most topic modeling algorithms, with the colloquial-to-formal strategy yielding the greatest performance gains and especially for the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm. This study contributes to a model-agnostic approach to enhancing topic modeling in public health related social media analysis, with broad implications for improved understanding of public discourse in health crisis as well as other important domains.

Trump's Epstein crisis explodes as lewd birthday letter showing president's signature is revealed Judge's'promise' let career criminal walk free to butcher Ukrainian refugee after his MOM said he should be locked up'She was so f***ed up': Carolyn Bessette's friends tell MAUREEN CALLAHAN of her secret Daddy issue, JFK Jr's murder brag that drove her mad... and why everything we know about her is a lie The chaos behind when Meghan Markle was told not to be at Queen Elizabeth II's deathbed They were locked in a dungeon inside a house of horrors. But incredible footage shows five kids' daring acts while their parents were out... and it left neighbors speechless Turn back the clock with the K-beauty retinol cream Amazon shoppers say leaves their skin'silky smooth' - and it's now $10 Scientists crack the ultimate answer to the meaning of life... and it's hidden among 38M obituaries CBS News hires a CONSERVATIVE to police interviews after Trump and Noem'deceptive' editing fury Scientist claims life on Earth was not random... but engineered Supreme Court LIFTS restrictions on Trump's immigration raids despite claims agents targeted people by race I was 52 with a collapsed'turkey neck'. Here's how I turned back the clock 10 years Plastic surgeons weigh in on Jessica Simpson's dramatic new look at VMAs as fans declare her'unrecognizable' Billionaire turns his back on Trump as he blasts President's'risky' financial move that could cost Americans their savings Trump loses appeal and must pay $83 million to E. Jean Carroll AMANDA PLATELL: Harry is'desperate' to come back to Britain and reclaim his royal role - but this fresh snub from William makes it clear why it will never happen... and why he'll never forgive his brother Scientists crack the ultimate answer to the meaning of life... and it's hidden among 38million obituaries Scientists on a mission to uncover what constitutes a life well lived found the answer after analyzing 38 million obituaries from the US spanning 30 years. Using automated text analysis tools, the team found that the most commonly celebrated values were tradition and benevolence. Nearly 80 percent of obituaries highlighted respect for customs or religion, while 76 percent emphasized caring, reliability and trustworthiness.

This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric and topic analysis of the disaster informatics literature published between January 2020 to September 2022. Leveraging a large-scale corpus and advanced techniques such as pre-trained language models and generative AI, we identify the most active countries, institutions, authors, collaboration networks, emergent topics, patterns among the most significant topics, and shifts in research priorities spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings highlight (1) countries that were most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic were also among the most active, with each country having specific research interests, (2) countries and institutions within the same region or share a common language tend to collaborate, (3) top active authors tend to form close partnerships with one or two key partners, (4) authors typically specialized in one or two specific topics, while institutions had more diverse interests across several topics, and (5) the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced research priorities in disaster informatics, placing greater emphasis on public health. We further demonstrate that the field is converging on multidimensional resilience strategies and cross-sectoral data-sharing collaborations or projects, reflecting a heightened awareness of global vulnerability and interdependency. Collecting and quality assurance strategies, data analytic practices, LLM-based topic extraction and summarization approaches, and result visualization tools can be applied to comparable datasets or solve similar analytic problems. By mapping out the trends in disaster informatics, our analysis offers strategic insights for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars aiming to enhance disaster informatics capacities in an increasingly uncertain and complex risk landscape.

In epidemic modeling, outliers can distort parameter estimation and ultimately lead to misguided public health decisions. Although there are existing robust methods that can mitigate this distortion, the ability to simultaneously detect outliers is equally vital for identifying potential disease hotspots. In this work, we introduce a robust spatiotemporal generalized additive model (RST-GAM) to address this need. We accomplish this with a mean-shift parameter to quantify and adjust for the effects of outliers and rely on adaptive Lasso regularization to model the sparsity of outlying observations. We use univariate polynomial splines and bivariate penalized splines over triangulations to estimate the functional forms and a data-thinning approach for data-adaptive weight construction. We derive a scalable proximal algorithm to estimate model parameters by minimizing a convex negative log-quasi-likelihood function. Our algorithm uses adaptive step-sizes to ensure global convergence of the resulting iterate sequence. We establish error bounds and selection consistency for the estimated parameters and demonstrate our model's effectiveness through numerical studies under various outlier scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of RST-GAM by analyzing county-level COVID-19 infection data in the United States, highlighting its potential to inform public health decision-making.

Toxic and uncivil politics is widely seen as a growing threat to democratic values and governance, yet our understanding of the drivers and evolution of political incivility remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of nearly 18 million Twitter messages from parliamentarians in 17 countries over five years, this paper systematically investigates whether politics internationally is becoming more uncivil, and what are the determinants of political incivility. Our analysis reveals a marked increase in toxic discourse among political elites, and that it is associated to radical-right parties and parties in opposition. Toxicity diminished markedly during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and, surprisingly, during election campaigns. Furthermore, our results indicate that posts relating to ``culture war'' topics, such as migration and LGBTQ+ rights, are substantially more toxic than debates focused on welfare or economic issues. These findings underscore a troubling shift in international democracies toward an erosion of constructive democratic dialogue.

In this work, we apply topic modeling using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) on the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) to uncover the underlying thematic structure and its evolution within the extensive body of COVID-19 research literature. NMF factorizes the document-term matrix into two non-negative matrices, effectively representing the topics and their distribution across the documents. This helps us see how strongly documents relate to topics and how topics relate to words. We describe the complete methodology which involves a series of rigorous pre-processing steps to standardize the available text data while preserving the context of phrases, and subsequently feature extraction using the term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf), which assigns weights to words based on their frequency and rarity in the dataset. To ensure the robustness of our topic model, we conduct a stability analysis. This process assesses the stability scores of the NMF topic model for different numbers of topics, enabling us to select the optimal number of topics for our analysis. Through our analysis, we track the evolution of topics over time within the CORD-19 dataset. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the knowledge structure of the COVID-19 research landscape, providing a valuable resource for future research in this field.

Long COVID continues to challenge public health by affecting a considerable number of individuals who have recovered from acute SARS-CoV-2 infection yet endure prolonged and often debilitating symptoms. Social media has emerged as a vital resource for those seeking real-time information, peer support, and validating their health concerns related to Long COVID. This paper examines recent works focusing on mining, analyzing, and interpreting user-generated content on social media platforms to capture the broader discourse on persistent post-COVID conditions. A novel transformer-based zero-shot learning approach serves as the foundation for classifying research papers in this area into four primary categories: Clinical or Symptom Characterization, Advanced NLP or Computational Methods, Policy Advocacy or Public Health Communication, and Online Communities and Social Support. This methodology achieved an average confidence of 0.7788, with the minimum and maximum confidence being 0.1566 and 0.9928, respectively. This model showcases the ability of advanced language models to categorize research papers without any training data or predefined classification labels, thus enabling a more rapid and scalable assessment of existing literature. This paper also highlights the multifaceted nature of Long COVID research by demonstrating how advanced computational techniques applied to social media conversations can reveal deeper insights into the experiences, symptoms, and narratives of individuals affected by Long COVID.

Studying public sentiment during crises is crucial for understanding how opinions and sentiments shift, resulting in polarized societies. We study Weibo, the most popular microblogging site in China, using posts made during the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis. The study period includes the pre-COVID-19 stage, the outbreak stage, and the early stage of epidemic prevention. We use Llama 3 8B, a Large Language Model, to analyze users' sentiments on the platform by classifying them into positive, negative, sarcastic, and neutral categories. Analyzing sentiment shifts on Weibo provides insights into how social events and government actions influence public opinion. This study contributes to understanding the dynamics of social sentiments during health crises, fulfilling a gap in sentiment analysis for Chinese platforms. By examining these dynamics, we aim to offer valuable perspectives on digital communication's role in shaping society's responses during unprecedented global challenges.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, community tensions intensified, fuelling Hinduphobic sentiments and discrimination against individuals of Hindu descent within India and worldwide. Large language models (LLMs) have become prominent in natural language processing (NLP) tasks and social media analysis, enabling longitudinal studies of platforms like X (formerly Twitter) for specific issues during COVID-19. We present an abuse detection and sentiment analysis framework that offers a longitudinal analysis of Hinduphobia on X (Twitter) during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This framework assesses the prevalence and intensity of Hinduphobic discourse, capturing elements such as derogatory jokes and racist remarks through sentiment analysis and abuse detection from pre-trained and fine-tuned LLMs. Additionally, we curate and publish a "Hinduphobic COVID-19 X (Twitter) Dataset" of 8,000 tweets annotated for Hinduphobic abuse detection, which is used to fine-tune a BERT model, resulting in the development of the Hinduphobic BERT (HP-BERT) model. We then further fine-tune HP-BERT using the SenWave dataset for multi-label sentiment analysis. Our study encompasses approximately 27.4 million tweets from six countries, including Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Our findings reveal a strong correlation between spikes in COVID-19 cases and surges in Hinduphobic rhetoric, highlighting how political narratives, misinformation, and targeted jokes contributed to communal polarisation. These insights provide valuable guidance for developing strategies to mitigate communal tensions in future crises, both locally and globally. We advocate implementing automated monitoring and removal of such content on social media to curb divisive discourse.