With the recent approval of COVID-19 vaccines, a large debate about safety has emerged on social media. Positions in favor and against the vaccines have fueled such a discussion with arguments that are often based on unreliable sources, when not on fake news. This project aims at monitoring and visualizing the dynamics of the Twitter debate, to get a sense of the public sentiment, while highlighting tweets that mention potential adverse events. A website has been created and has been a constantly updated to visualize what the crowd is talking about and what pieces of information are being shared. Team: Lead Board Giuseppe Serra (University of Udine) Enrico Santus (AI Advisor @ Women’s Brain Project) Emmanuele Chersoni (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) Developers Beatrice Portelli (University of Udine) Roberto Tonino (University of Udine) Edoardo Lenzi (University of Udine) Simone Scaboro (University of Udine).

http://ailab.uniud.it/covid-vaccines/

• International

• Older persons
• Women
• People with disabilities
• The poor

The full System behind this website consists of a module dedicated to data collection and five separate Artificial Intelligence modules dedicated to data processing: Localization, Hashtag Analysis, URL Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Symptom Extraction. In particular, the ICT tools developed for this project are Natural Language Processing algorithms to extract and understand the text collected by social media.