esantus

COVID Safe paths

Vaccine hesitancy refers to the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the effectiveness and availability of vaccines. The growing global epidemic of vaccine hesitancy threatens to reverse the worldwide progress made over the past few decades in tackling vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs). The World Health Organization (WHO) listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top threats to global health in 2019.

The current suboptimal uptake of COVID-19 vaccines across North America, Europe and many other parts of the world (e.g. Hong Kong and Singapore) further highlights the tremendous challenges in overcoming vaccine hesitancy and refusal even in the context of a world-devastating pandemic that has killed more than 3 million people and caused more than US$16 trillion of economic damage worldwide.

In collaboration with the University of Udine, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Hong Kong University, we are developing Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing systems to understand the reasons behind vaccine hesitancy, contrast misinformation and develop personalized educational strategies to mitigate this problem.

First step in this process has been the development of a social listening platform, called COVID-19 Vaccine Opinion Analysis, which utilizes state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing techniques (i.e. SpanBERT) to daily monitor vaccine opinion on Twitter. The system is able to extract information such as: location, topics, sources of information, sentiment and side effects.

The collaborators of this project include (but they are not limited to): Beatrice Portelli, Roberto Tonino, Simone Scaboro, Edoardo Lenzi, Gabriele Dominici, Giuseppe Serra, Emmanuele Chersoni, Nicola Marino, Simone Bianco and Enrico Santus.

See also: Fake News Detection

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