Struggle to Settle down! Examining the Voices of Migrants and Refugees on Twitter Platform

authored by

Aparup Khatua, Wolfgang Nejdl

Abstract

Prior studies, mostly from the social science domain, have observed that mental stress and struggles are high for refugees. Information science researchers have found that social media data can be insightful for probing psychological stress. However, none of the previous studies, to the best of our knowledge, investigated social media data to identify the voices of migrants and refugees and analyzed their concerns. We have collected 0.15 million tweets, but only 2% of these tweets are the voices of migrants and refugees. In addition to non-refugee and non-migrant voices, we have classified their voices into three themes as follows: their generic views, initial struggles, and subsequent settlement in the host country. We have employed deep learning and transformer-based models for identifying these themes. Our best-performing transformer-based model has reported an accuracy of 75.89%. We have also identified some exciting avenues for future research.

Organisation(s)

L3S Research Centre

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

95-98

No. of pages

4

Publication date

23.10.2021

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software, Computer Networks and Communications, Human-Computer Interaction

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1145/3462204.3481773 (Access: Closed)
https://zenodo.org/records/6683730 (Access: Open)