Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Social Determinants of Health Issues of Marginalized Black and Asian Communities: A Social Media Analysis Empowered by Natural Language Processing.

Journal: Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities
PMID:

Abstract

PURPOSE: This study aims to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social determinants of health (SDOH) of marginalized racial/ethnic US population groups, specifically African Americans and Asians, by leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques on race-related spatiotemporal social media text data. Specifically, this study establishes the extent to which Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Gibbs Sampling Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture (GSDMM)-based topic modeling determines social determinants of health (SDOH) categories, and how adequately custom named-entity recognition (NER) detects key SDOH factors from a race/ethnicity-related Reddit data corpus.

Authors

  • Christopher Whitfield
    North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC, 27411, USA.
  • Yang Liu
    Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China.
  • Mohd Anwar
    North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC, 27411, USA. manwar@ncat.edu.