Identification of Social Media Posts Containing Self-reported COVID-19 Symptoms using Triple Word Embeddings and Long Short-Term Memory

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has permeated the global sphere and influenced nearly all nations and regions. Common symptoms of this pandemic include fever, cough, fatigue, and loss of sense of smell. The impact of COVID-19 on public health and the economy has made it a significant global concern. It has caused economic contraction in Indonesia, particularly in face-to-face interaction and mobility sectors, such as transportation, warehousing, construction, and food and beverages. Since the pandemic began, Twitter users have shared symptoms in their tweets. However, they couldn't confirm their concerns due to testing limitations, reporting delays, and pre-registration requirements in healthcare. The classification of text from Twitter data about COVID-19 topics has predominantly focused on sentiment analysis regarding the pandemic or vaccination. Research on identifying COVID-19 symptoms through social media messages is limited in the literature. The main objective of this study is to identify symptoms using word embedding techniques and the LSTM algorithm. Various techniques such as Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText, and a composite approach are used. LSTM is used for classification, improving upon the RNN technique. Evaluation criteria include accuracy, precision, and recall. The model with an input dimension of 147x100 achieves the highest accuracy at 89%. This study aims to find the best LSTM model for detecting COVID-19 symptoms in social media tweets. It evaluates LSTM models with different word embedding techniques and input dimensions, providing insights into the optimal text-based method for COVID-19 detection through social media texts.