Automatically Identifying Twitter Users for Interventions to Support Dementia Family Caregivers: Annotated Data Set and Benchmark Classification Models
ABSTRACT
Background:
More than 6 million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, receiving help from more than 11 million family or other informal caregivers. A range of traditional interventions have been developed to support family caregivers; however, most of them have not been implemented in practice and remain largely inaccessible. While recent studies have shown that family caregivers of people with dementia use Twitter to discuss their experiences, methods have not been developed to enable the use of Twitter for interventions.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to develop an annotated data set and benchmark classification models for automatically identifying a cohort of Twitter users who have a family member with dementia.
Methods:
Between May 4, 2021 and May 20, 2021, we collected 10,733 tweets, posted by 8846 users, that mention a dementia-related keyword, a linguistic marker that potentially indicates a diagnosis, and a select familial relationship. Three annotators annotated one random tweet per user to distinguish those that indicate having a family member with dementia from those that do not. We used the annotated tweets to train and evaluate deep neural network classifiers based on pretrained transformer models. To assess the scalability of our approach, we, then, deployed automatic classification on tweets that were continuously collected between May 4, 2021 and March 9, 2022.
Results:
Inter-annotator agreement was 0.82 (Fleiss’ kappa). A classifier based on a BERT model pretrained on tweets achieved the highest F1-score of 0.962 (precision = 0.946, recall = 0.979) for the class of tweets indicating that the user has a family member with dementia. The classifier detected 128,838 tweets that indicate having a family member with dementia, posted by 74,290 users between May 4, 2021 and March 9, 2022—that is, approximately 7500 users per month.
Conclusions:
Our annotated data set can be used to automatically identify Twitter users who have a family member with dementia, enabling the use of Twitter on a large scale to not only explore family caregivers’ experiences, but also directly target interventions at these users.
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