Few-Shot Learning for Identification of COVID-19 Symptoms Using Generative Pre-trained Transformer Language Models

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2022)

Abstract

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media users have shared their personal experiences related to the viral infection. Their posts contain rich information of symptoms that may provide useful hints to advancing the knowledge body of medical research and supplement the discoveries from clinical settings. Identification of symptom expressions in social media text is challenging, partially due to lack of annotated data. In this study, we investigate utilizing few-shot learning with generative pre-trained transformer language models to identify COVID-19 symptoms in Twitter posts. The results of our approach show that large language models are promising in more accurately identifying symptom expressions in Twitter posts with small amount of annotation effort, and our method can be applied to other medical and health applications where abundant of unlabeled data is available.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
EUR 32.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or Ebook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Chen, E., Lerman, K., Ferrara, E.: Tracking social media discourse about the covid-19 pandemic: development of a public coronavirus twitter data set. JMIR Public Health Surveill. 6(2), e19273 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Müller, M., Salathé, M., Kummervold, P.E.: COVID-Twitter-BERT: A natural language processing model to analyse covid-19 content on twitter. ar**v preprint ar**v:2005.07503 (2020)

  3. Wijeratne, S., et al.: Feature engineering for Twitter-based applications. In Feature Engineering for Machine Learning and Data Analytics, pp. 359–393 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Guo, J.W., Radloff, C.L., Wawrzynski, S.E., Cloyes, K.G.: Mining twitter to explore the emergence of COVID-19 symptoms. Public Health Nurs. 37(6), 934–940 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Krittanawong, C., Narasimhan, B., Virk, H.U.H., Narasimhan, H., Wang, Z., Tang, W.W.: Insights from Twitter about novel COVID-19 symptoms. Eur. Heart J. Digital Health 1(1), 4–5 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Sarker, A., Lakamana, S., HoggBremer, W., **e, A., AlGaradi, M.A., Yang, Y.C.: Self-reported COVID-19 symptoms on Twitter: an analysis and a research resource. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 27(8), 1310–1315 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Jiang, K., Zhu, M., Bernard, G.R.: Discovery of COVID-19 symptomatic experience reported by twitter users. Stud. Health Technol. Inform. 294, 664–668 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Radford, A., Narasimhan, K., Salimans, T., Sutskever, I.: Improving language understanding by generative pre-training (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Brown, T., et al.: Language models are few-shot learners. Adv. Neural. Inf. Process. Syst. 33, 1877–1901 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Black, S., et al.: GPT-NeoX-20b: an open-source autoregressive language model. ar**v preprint ar**v:2204.06745 (2022)

  11. Radford, A., Wu, J., Child, R., Luan, D., Amodei, D., Sutskever, I.: Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI blog 1(8), 9 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Gao, L., et al.: The pile: an 800gb dataset of diverse text for language modeling. ar**v preprint ar**v:2101.00027 (2020)

  13. Logan IV, R.L., Balažević, I., Wallace, E., Petroni, F., Singh, S., Riedel, S.: Cutting down on prompts and parameters: simple few-shot learning with language models. ar**v preprint ar**v:2106.13353 (2021)

  14. Zhu, M., Song, Y., **, G., Jiang, K.: Identifying personal experience tweets of medication effects using pre-trained RoBERTa language model and its updating. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis, pp. 127–137 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Liu, Y., et al.: RoBERTa: A robustly optimized BERT pretraining approach. ar**v preprint ar**v:1907.11692 (2019)

  16. Demner-Fushman, D., Rogers, W.J., Aronson, A.R.: MetaMap lite: an evaluation of a new Java implementation of MetaMap. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 24(4), 841–844 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. World Health Organization: Diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 (2020). https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/334254/WHO-2019-nCoV-laboratory-2020.6-eng.pdf

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Keyuan Jiang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Jiang, K., Zhu, M., Bernard, G.R. (2023). Few-Shot Learning for Identification of COVID-19 Symptoms Using Generative Pre-trained Transformer Language Models. In: Koprinska, I., et al. Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1753. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23633-4_21

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23633-4_21

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-23632-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-23633-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Navigation