Mining Coronavirus (COVID-19) Posts in Social Media

Understand

World Health Organization (WHO) characterized the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) as a global pandemic on March 11th, 2020.

• Before this and in late January, more specifically on January 27th, while the majority of the infection cases were still reported in China and a few cruise ships, we began crawling social media user postings using the Twitter search API.
• Our goal was to leverage machine learning and linguistic tools to better understand the impact of the outbreak in China.
• Unlike our initial expectation to monitor a local outbreak, COVID-19 rapidly spread across the globe.