A Domain-Agnostic Neurosymbolic Approach for Big Social Data Analysis: Evaluating Mental Health Sentiment on Social Media during COVID-19

Monitoring public sentiment via social media is potentially helpful during health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, traditional frequency-based and data-driven neural network-based approaches can miss newly relevant content due to the evolving nature of language in a dynamic environment. Human-curated symbolic knowledge sources, such as lexicons for standard language and slang terms, can potentially elevate social media signals in evolving language. We introduce a neurosymbolic method that integrates neural networks with symbolic knowledge sources, improving the detection and interpretation of mental health-related tweets relevant to COVID-19. Our method was evaluated using a corpus of large datasets (~12 billion tweets, 2.5 million subreddit data, and 700k news articles) and multiple knowledge graphs. This method dynamically adapts to evolving language, outperforming purely data-driven models with an F1 score exceeding 92%. This approach also showed faster adaptation to new data and lower computational demands than fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs). This study demonstrates the benefit of neurosymbolic methods in interpreting text in a dynamic environment for tasks such as health surveillance.