Fuzzy Matching for Symptom Detection in Tweets: Application to Covid-19 During the First Wave of the Pandemic in France

Carole Faviez (1, 2) , Pierre Foulquié (3) , Xiaoyi Chen (2, 1) , Adel Mebarki (3) , Sophie Quennelle (2, 4) , Nathalie Texier (3) , Sandrine Katsahian (2, 4, 1) , Stéphane Schuck (3) , Anita Burgun (2, 4, 1)

1 HeKA - Health data- and model- driven Knowledge Acquisition
2 CRC (UMR_S_1138 / U1138) - Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers
3 Kap Code
4 HEGP - Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou [APHP]

The exhaustive automatic detection of symptoms in social media posts is made difficult by the presence of colloquial expressions, misspellings and inflected forms of words. The detection of self-reported symptoms is of major importance for emergent diseases like the Covid-19. In this study, we aimed to (1) develop an algorithm based on fuzzy matching to detect symptoms in tweets, (2) establish a comprehensive list of Covid-19-related symptoms and (3) evaluate the fuzzy matching for Covid-19-related symptom detection in French tweets. The Covid-19-related symptom list was built based on the aggregation of different data sources. French Covid-19-related tweets were automatically extracted using a dedicated data broker during the first wave of the pandemic in France. The fuzzy matching parameters were finetuned using all symptoms from MedDRA and then evaluated on a subset of 5000 Covid-19-related tweets in French for the detection of symptoms from our Covid-19-related list. The fuzzy matching improved the detection by the addition of 42% more correct matches with an 81% precision.

Mots clés: Content analysis; Social media; Fuzzy matching; Symptoms; Covid-19

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Santé publique et épidémiologie

Carole Faviez, Pierre Foulquié, Xiaoyi Chen, Adel Mebarki, Sophie Quennelle, et al.. Fuzzy Matching for Symptom Detection in Tweets: Application to Covid-19 During the First Wave of the Pandemic in France. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 2021, ⟨10.3233/shti210308⟩. ⟨hal-03253247⟩