Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Italian Debate on Measles Vaccination: How Twitter Data Highlight Communities and Polarity

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2022)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1753))

  • 585 Accesses

Abstract

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and You-Tube had proven to be valuable sources of information. These platforms are a fruitful source of freely collectible public opinions. Due to the recent outbreak of the monkeypox disease, and in light of the historical pandemic that affected the whole world, we examine the issue of understanding the Italian opinion towards vaccinations of diseases that have apparently disappeared. To address this issue, we study the flow of information on the measles vaccine by looking at Twitter data. We discovered that vaccine skeptics have a higher tweeting activity, and the hashtags used by the three classes of users (pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine, and neutral) fall into three different communities, corresponding to the groups identified by opinion polarization towards the vaccine. By analyzing how hashtags are shared in different communities, we show that communication exists only in the neutral-opinion community.

C.I. Ugwu and S. Casarin—Contributed equally to this work.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Gastanaduy, P., Haber, P., Rota, P.A., Patel, M.: Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases. 14th edn. (2021). Chap. 13

    Google Scholar 

  2. WHO Homepage, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/masles. Last accessed 16 June 2022

  3. Medić, S., et al.: Epidemiological, clinical and laboratory characteristics of the measles resurgence in the Republic of Serbia in 2014–2015. Publ. Lib. Sci. (PLoS), 14(10) e0224009 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224009

  4. Manguri, K.H., Ramadhan, R.N., Mohammed Amin, P.R.: Twitter sentiment analysis on worldwide COVID-19 outbreaks. Kurdistan J. Appl. Res. 54–65 (2020). https://doi.org/10.24017/covid.8

  5. Boon-Itt, S., Skunkan, Y.: Public perception of the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter: Sentiment analysis and topic modeling study. JMIR Public Health Surveill (2020). https://doi.org/10.2196/21978

  6. Marcec, R., Likic, R.: Using Twitter for sentiment analysis towards AstraZeneca/Oxford, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Postgraduate Med. J. (2021). https://doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2021-140685

  7. Epicentro. https://www.epicentro.iss.it/morbillo/Infografica2017. Accessed 17 June 2022

  8. Geetha, R., Rekha, P., Karthika, S.: Twitter opinion mining and boosting using sentiment analysis. In: International Conference on Computer, Communication, and Signal Processing (ICCCSP), pp. 1–4 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCSP.2018.8452838

  9. Pak, A., Paroubek, P.: Twitter as a corpus for sentiment analysis and opinion mining. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’10). European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Valletta, Malta (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Kolasani, S.V., Assaf., R.: Predicting stock movement using sentiment analysis of twitter feed with neural networks. J. Data Anal. Inf. Process. (2020). https://doi.org/10.4236/jdaip.2020.84018

  11. Cossard, A., De Francisci Morales, G., Kalimeri, K., Mejova, Y., Paolotti, D., Starnini, M.: Falling into the Echo Chamber: the Italian Vaccination Debate on Twitter. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2020)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Gargiulo, F., Cafiero, F., Guille-Escuret, P., Seror, V., Ward, J. K.: Asymmetric participation of defenders and critics of vaccines to debates on French-speaking Twitter. In: Sci. Rep. 10(1) 6599 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62880-5

  13. Filia, A., Bella, A., Del Manso, M., Rota, M.C.: L’epidemia di morbillo in Italia nel 2017. In: Rivista di Immunologia e Allergologia Pediatrica (RIAP) (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Giancarlo, N.: SentITA, a sentiment analysis tool for Italian. 2018. https://github.com/NicGian/SentITA. Accessed 6 Apr 2022

  15. EVALITA. Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian. https://www.evalita.it/evalita-2016/tasks-challenge/. Accessed 1 June 2022

  16. GeoPy’s Documentation. https://geopy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/. Accessed 17 June 2022

  17. Nominatim. https://nominatim.org/. Aaccessed 17 June 2022

  18. Gephi. https://gephi.org/. Accessed 17 June 2022

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universita’ degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy

    Sofia Casarin

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Cynthia Ifeyinwa Ugwu

Authors
  1. Cynthia Ifeyinwa Ugwu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Sofia Casarin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sofia Casarin .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Irena Koprinska

  2. University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Paolo Mignone

  3. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Riccardo Guidotti

  4. Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

    Szymon Jaroszewicz

  5. Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

    Holger Fröning

  6. UniCredit, Rome, Italy

    Francesco Gullo

  7. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Pedro M. Ferreira

  8. Roche, Basel, Switzerland

    Damian Roqueiro

  9. Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain

    Gaia Ceddia

  10. Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden

    Slawomir Nowaczyk

  11. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    João Gama

  12. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Rita Ribeiro

  13. UPC BarcelonaTech, Barcelona, Spain

    Ricard Gavaldà

  14. University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy

    Elio Masciari

  15. University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA

    Zbigniew Ras

  16. ICAR-CNR, Rende, Italy

    Ettore Ritacco

  17. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Francesca Naretto

  18. Aalen University of Applied Sciences, Aalen, Germany

    Andreas Theissler

  19. Warsaw University of Technology, Warszaw, Poland

    Przemyslaw Biecek

  20. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Wouter Verbeke

  21. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Gregor Schiele

  22. Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Franz Pernkopf

  23. AMD, Dublin, Ireland

    Michaela Blott

  24. UniCredit, Rome, Italy

    Ilaria Bordino

  25. UniCredit, Milan, Italy

    Ivan Luciano Danesi

  26. National Agency for New Technologies, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Ponti

  27. Unicredit, Rome, Italy

    Lorenzo Severini

  28. University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Annalisa Appice

  29. University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Giuseppina Andresini

  30. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ibéria Medeiros

  31. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Guilherme Graça

  32. Northwestern University, Chicago, USA

    Lee Cooper

  33. Roche, Basel, Switzerland

    Naghmeh Ghazaleh

  34. University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Jonas Richiardi

  35. Novartis, Basel, Switzerland

    Diego Saldana

  36. Novartis, Basel, Switzerland

    Konstantinos Sechidis

  37. Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milan, Italy

    Arif Canakoglu

  38. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Sara Pido

  39. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Pietro Pinoli

  40. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Albert Bifet

  41. Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden

    Sepideh Pashami

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Ugwu, C.I., Casarin, S. (2023). Italian Debate on Measles Vaccination: How Twitter Data Highlight Communities and Polarity. In: Koprinska, I., et al. Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1753. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23633-4_24

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23633-4_24

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-23632-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-23633-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation