Mining Textual and Imagery Instagram Data during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Instagram is perhaps the most rapidly gaining in popularity of photo and video sharing social networking applications. It has been widely adopted by both end-users and organizations, posting their personal experiences or expressing their opinion during significant events and periods of crises, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the search for effective vaccine treatment. We identify the three major companies involved in vaccine research and extract their Instagram posts, after vaccination has started, as well as users’ reception using respective hashtags, constructing the datasets. Statistical differences regarding the companies are initially presented, on textual, as well as visual features, i.e., image classification by transfer learning. Appropriate preprocessing of English language posts and content analysis is subsequently performed, by automatically annotating the posts as one of four intent classes, thus facilitating the training of nine classifiers for a potential application capable of predicting user’s intent. By designing and carrying out a controlled experiment we validate that the resulted algorithms’ accuracy ranking is significant, identifying the two best performing algorithms; this is further improved by ensemble techniques. Finally, polarity analysis on users’ posts, leveraging a convolutional neural network, reveals a rather neutral to negative sentiment, with highly polarized user posts’ distributions.