The exhaustive automatic detection of symptoms in social media posts is made difficult by the presence of colloquial expressions, misspellings and inflected forms of words. The detection of self-reported symptoms is of major importance for emergent diseases like the Covid-19. In this study, we aimed to (1) develop an algorithm based on fuzzy matching to detect symptoms in tweets, (2) establish a comprehensive list of Covid-19-related symptoms and (3) evaluate the fuzzy matching for Covid-19-related symptom detection in French tweets. The Covid-19-related symptom list was built based on the aggregation of different data sources. French Covid-19-related tweets were automatically extracted using a dedicated data broker during the first wave of the pandemic in France. The fuzzy matching parameters were finetuned using all symptoms from MedDRA and then evaluated on a subset of 5000 Covid-19-related tweets in French for the detection of symptoms from our Covid-19-related list. The fuzzy matching improved the detection by the addition of 42% more correct matches with an 81% precision.
Fuzzy Matching for Symptom Detection in Tweets: Application to Covid-19 During the First Wave of the Pandemic in France.