Separating Fact from Fear: Tracking Flu Infections on Twitter

Alex Lamb, Michael Paul and Mark Dredze

Twitter has been shown to be a fast and reliable method for disease surveillance of common illnesses like influenza. However, previous work has relied on simple content analysis, which conflates flu tweets that report infection with those that express concerned awareness of the flu. By discriminating these categories, as well as tweets about the authors versus about others, we demonstrate significant improvements on influenza surveillance using Twitter.