1,875 research outputs found
Firsthand Opiates Abuse on Social Media: Monitoring Geospatial Patterns of Interest Through a Digital Cohort
In the last decade drug overdose deaths reached staggering proportions in the
US. Besides the raw yearly deaths count that is worrisome per se, an alarming
picture comes from the steep acceleration of such rate that increased by 21%
from 2015 to 2016. While traditional public health surveillance suffers from
its own biases and limitations, digital epidemiology offers a new lens to
extract signals from Web and Social Media that might be complementary to
official statistics. In this paper we present a computational approach to
identify a digital cohort that might provide an updated and complementary view
on the opioid crisis. We introduce an information retrieval algorithm suitable
to identify relevant subspaces of discussion on social media, for mining data
from users showing explicit interest in discussions about opioid consumption in
Reddit. Moreover, despite the pseudonymous nature of the user base, almost 1.5
million users were geolocated at the US state level, resembling the census
population distribution with a good agreement. A measure of prevalence of
interest in opiate consumption has been estimated at the state level, producing
a novel indicator with information that is not entirely encoded in the standard
surveillance. Finally, we further provide a domain specific vocabulary
containing informal lexicon and street nomenclature extracted by user-generated
content that can be used by researchers and practitioners to implement novel
digital public health surveillance methodologies for supporting policy makers
in fighting the opioid epidemic.Comment: Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW '19
Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
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