Analyzing COVID-19 Tweets with Transformer-based Language Models

Abstract: This paper describes a method for using Transformer-based LLMs (TLMs) to understand public opinion from social media posts. In this approach, we train a set of GPT models on several COVID-19 tweet corpora that reflect populations of users with distinctive views. We then use prompt-based queries to probe these models to reveal insights into the biases and opinions of the users. We demonstrate how this approach can be used to produce results which resemble polling the public on diverse social, political and public health issues. The results on the COVID-19 tweet data show that transformer LLMs are promising tools that can help us understand public opinions on social media at scale.