Events Calendar

NL Seminar Chasing vaccination in social media: Narrative discovery from an unstructured corpus of text

Speaker: Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh , UCLA

Talk Title: Chasing vaccination in social media: Narrative discovery from an unstructured corpus of text

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: The measles outbreak in California was a serious public health crisis. Health officials attributed the outbreak to the increasing number of children whose parents had secured exemptions from vaccination for various vaccine preventable diseases VPDs. We believe that exemption seeking is part of a broader culture of distrust driven in large part by stories circulating in social media. An under-standing of the dynamics of this broader culture is necessary if we are to develop health policies that do not simply address outcomes but rather the cultural basis for decisions leading to those outcomes. We reveal the dynamics of exemption seeking and the greater culture of distrust endemic to these sites by developing a generative statistical mechanical model where stories are represented as net- works with actants such as parents, medical professionals, and religious institutions as nodes, and their various relationships as edges. We estimate the latent but unknown stories circulating on these sites by modeling the posts as a sampling of the hidden story graph. Working with a data set of 2 million posts crawled from parenting sites over a 5 year period, we uncover a strong, persistent story signal in which parents, driven by a distrust of government and medical institutions, devise strategies to secure exemptions for their children from required vaccinations. In these stories, it is the vaccines and not the VPDs that pose a threat to the children. Our method of analyzing social media conversations and the exchange of stories at scale can provide an alert mechanism to health officials, help lay the groundwork for devising community-specific messaging interventions, and inform policy making.

Biography: Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh is a PhD candidate in the Electrical Engineering Department of UCLA, where he is simultaneously working towards my his degree in Applied Mathematics. Broadly speaking, he is interested in Statistics, Applied probability, and Data Analytics. Before joining UCLA in 2013, he received his MASc degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Waterloo, and BSc degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology.

Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/