Mining internet media for monitoring changes of public emotions about infectious diseases

The Internet encompasses websites, email, social media, and Internet-based television. Given the widespread use of networked computers and mobile devices, it has become possible to monitor the behavior of Internet users by examining their access logs and queries. Based on large-scale web and text mining of Internet media articles and associated user comments, we propose a framework to rapidly monitor how the emotion of the public changes over time and apply the framework to a real case of an infectious disease. The proposed methodology will be helpful for performing cost-effective and time-efficient public health monitoring that otherwise would take orders-of-magnitude more time and resources if traditional epidemiology techniques were used.