ANTi-Vax: a novel Twitter dataset for COVID-19 vaccine misinformation detection.

OBJECTIVES: COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has infected hundreds of millions and inflicted millions of deaths around the globe. Fortunately, the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines provided a glimmer of hope and a pathway to recovery. However, owing to misinformation being spread on social media and other platforms, there has been a rise in vaccine hesitancy which can lead to a negative impact on vaccine uptake in the population. The goal of this research is to introduce a novel machine learning-based COVID-19 vaccine misinformation detection framework. STUDY DESIGN: We collected and annotated COVID-19 vaccine tweets and trained machine learning algorithms to classify vaccine misinformation. METHODS: More than 15,000 tweets were annotated as misinformation or general vaccine tweets using reliable sources and validated by medical experts. The classification models explored were XGBoost, LSTM, and BERT transformer model. RESULTS: The best classification performance was obtained using BERT, resulting in 0.98 F1-score on the test set. The precision and recall scores were 0.97 and 0.98, respectively. CONCLUSION: Machine learning-based models are effective in detecting misinformation regarding COVID-19 vaccines on social media platforms.

Cross-cultural standardization of the South Texas Assessment of Neurocognition in India.

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES: Despite the central role of cognition for mental disorders most studies have been conducted in western countries. Similar research from other parts of the world, particularly India, is very limited. As a first step in closing this gap this cross-cultural comparability study of the South Texas Assessment of Neurocognition (STAN) battery was conducted between USA and India. METHODS: One hundred healthy adults from Kerala, India, were administered six language independent subtests of the Java Neuropsychological Test (JANET) version of the STAN, assessing aspects of general intellectual ability (Matrix Reasoning), attention (Identical Pairs Continuous Performance, 3 Symbol Version Test; IPCPTS), working memory (Spatial Capacity Delayed Response Test; SCAP), response inhibition (Stop Signal Reaction Time; SSRT), Emotional Recognition and Risk taking (Balloon Analogue Risk Task; BART). Test results were compared to a demographically matched US sample. RESULTS: Overall test performance in the Kerala sample was comparable to that of the US sample and commensurate to that generally described in studies from western countries. INTERPRETATION & CONCLUSIONS: Our results support the metric equivalence of currently available cognitive test batteries developed in western countries for use in India. However, the sample was restricted to individuals who were literate and had completed basic primary and secondary education.