Sentiment Analysis Methods for HPV Vaccines Related Tweets Based on Transfer Learning

The widespread use of social media provides a large amount of data for public sentiment analysis. Based on social media data, researchers can study public opinions on human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines on social media using machine learning-based approaches that will help us understand the reasons behind the low vaccine coverage. However, social media data is usually unannotated, and data annotation is costly. The lack of an abundant annotated dataset limits the application of deep learning methods in effectively training models. To tackle this problem, we propose three transfer learning approaches to analyze the public sentiment on HPV vaccines on Twitter. One was transferring static embeddings and embeddings from language models (ELMo) and then processing by bidirectional gated recurrent unit with attention (BiGRU-Att), called DWE-BiGRU-Att. The others were fine-tuning pre-trained models with limited annotated data, called fine-tuning generative pre-training (GPT) and fine-tuning bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). The fine-tuned GPT model was built on the pre-trained generative pre-training (GPT) model. The fine-tuned BERT model was constructed with BERT model. The experimental results on the HPV dataset demonstrated the efficacy of the three methods in the sentiment analysis of the HPV vaccination task. The experimental results on the HPV dataset demonstrated the efficacy of the methods in the sentiment analysis of the HPV vaccination task. The fine-tuned BERT model outperforms all other methods. It can help to find strategies to improve vaccine uptake.