Applied mathematicians use AI to analyze tweets debating vaccination and climate change

Chris Bauch is part of a research team using artificial intelligence to analyze sentiment and interaction about contentious topics in social media.

The research project set out to learn how sentiments on climate change and vaccination may be related, how users form networks and share information, the relationship between online sentiments, and how people act and make decisions in daily life.

The team trained a machine-learning algorithm to analyze a massive trove of tweets about climate change and vaccination within the time frame between 2007 and 2016. The dataset for the project was drawn from a few sources, including some that were purchased from Twitter. In total, the analysis takes into consideration roughly 87 million tweets.

Bauch and team members Madhur Anand, Justin Schonfeld, Edward Qian, Jason Sinn, and Jeffrey Cheng published their findings, “Debates about vaccines and climate change on social media networks: a study in contrasts,” in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Read more in the article on Waterloo News.