Public Health Discussions on Social Media: Evaluating Automated Sentiment Analysis Methods

Researchers studying negative emotions, public worries, or dissatisfaction with social media face unique challenges in selecting models suitable for unbalanced datasets. We recommend VADER, the only cost-free tool we evaluated, due to its excellent discrimination, which can be further improved when the comments are at least 100 characters long. If estimating the prevalence of negative comments in an unbalanced dataset is important, we recommend the tone summary measure from LIWC-22. Researchers using T2D must know that it may only score some data and, compared with other methods, be more time-consuming and cost-prohibitive. A general-purpose large language model, ChatGPT 4.0, has yet to surpass the performance of NLP models, at least for unbalanced datasets with highly prevalent (7:1) negative comments.