Vaccine Hesitancy in Discussion Forums: Computer-Assisted Argument Mining with Topic Models.

Stud Health Technol Inform

Applied Computational Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.

Published: June 2018

AI Article Synopsis

  • Analyzing online discussions about vaccines can help understand why some people hesitate to get vaccinated.
  • The study used automatic topic modeling on 943 discussion posts to find six main topics related to vaccine debates.
  • By coding these posts, researchers identified clear arguments for each topic, suggesting that this method could aid in evaluating vaccine discourse more efficiently.

Article Abstract

Arguments used when vaccination is debated on Internet discussion forums might give us valuable insights into reasons behind vaccine hesitancy. In this study, we applied automatic topic modelling on a collection of 943 discussion posts in which vaccine was debated, and six distinct discussion topics were detected by the algorithm. When manually coding the posts ranked as most typical for these six topics, a set of semantically coherent arguments were identified for each extracted topic. This indicates that topic modelling is a useful method for automatically identifying vaccine-related discussion topics and for identifying debate posts where these topics are discussed. This functionality could facilitate manual coding of salient arguments, and thereby form an important component in a system for computer-assisted coding of vaccine-related discussions.

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