Analysing Twitter trends surrounding outbreak

Social technologist Yang Yinping has a passion for building and applying technology to advance human communications.

She has conducted research in areas such as sentiment analysis and emotion recognition, which have useful implications on public health.

For instance, in 2013, she co-led a project to examine social network activities during the H7N9 bird flu outbreak, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health.

Most recently, the principal investigator and group manager at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's Institute of High Performance Computing started examining people's sentiments during the Covid-19 pandemic, using an algorithm system which examines social media posts on Twitter.

To date, more than 124 million worldwide tweets have been collected and processed.

They are analysed according to four emotions - fear, anger, sadness and joy, along with the course of events contextualising these feelings.

For instance, "fear" was observed as the global sentiment when the virus first surfaced, followed by "anger" which peaked on March 12, a day after the World Health Organisation declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic.

Dr Yang said these feelings should be monitored closely, as they offer insights into concerns faced by the community.

But sentiments often vary across countries, perhaps owing to each government's response to the pandemic, among other factors, added Dr Yang.

In Singapore, for instance, "joy and other positive emotions" had overtaken initial feelings of "fear" from March 30 onwards, suggesting a sense of pride, gratitude and relief, she noted.

In the coming days, Dr Yang anticipates stronger sentiments of joy, in response to positive news of a vaccine and other treatment developments.