Public wellbeing analytics framework using social media chatter data

Abstract

Public wellbeing has always been crucial. Many governments around the globe prioritize the impact of their decisions on public wellbeing. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end public wellbeing analytics framework designed to predict the public’s wellbeing status and infer insights through the continuous analysis of social media content over several temporal events and across several locations. The proposed framework implements a novel distant supervision approach designed specifically to generate wellbeing-labeled datasets. In addition, it implements a wellbeing prediction model trained on contextualized sentence embeddings using BERT. Wellbeing predictions are visualized using several spatiotemporal analytics that can support decision-makers in gauging the impact of several government decisions and temporal events on the public, aiding in improving the decision-making process. Empirical experiments evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed distant supervision approach, the prediction model, and the utility of the produced analytics in gauging the public wellbeing status in a specific context.

Keywords: Distant supervision, Emotion lexicon, Public wellbeing, Sentence embeddings, Social media, Spatiotemporal analytics, Twitter