3 research outputs found
What Goes Around Comes Around: Learning Sentiments in Online Medical Forums
Currently 19%-28% of Internet users participate in online health discussions. A 2011 survey of the US population estimated that 59% of all adults have looked online for information about health topics such as a specific disease or treatment. Although empirical evidence strongly supports the importance of emotions in health-related messages, there are few studies of the relationship between a subjective lan-guage and online discussions of personal health. In this work, we study sentiments expressed on online medical forums. As well as considering the predominant sentiments expressed in individual posts, we analyze sequences of sentiments in online discussions. Individual posts are classified into one of five categories. We identified three categories as sentimental (encouragement, gratitude, confusion) and two categories as neutral (facts, endorsement). 1438 messages from 130 threads were annotated manually by two annotators with a strong inter-annotator agreement (Fleiss kappa = 0.737 and 0.763 for posts in se-quence and separate posts respectively). The annotated posts were used to analyse sentiments in consec-utive posts. In four multi-class classification problems, we assessed HealthAffect, a domain-specific af-fective lexicon, as well general sentiment lexicons in their ability to represent messages in sentiment recognition
Mining social media data for biomedical signals and health-related behavior
Social media data has been increasingly used to study biomedical and
health-related phenomena. From cohort level discussions of a condition to
planetary level analyses of sentiment, social media has provided scientists
with unprecedented amounts of data to study human behavior and response
associated with a variety of health conditions and medical treatments. Here we
review recent work in mining social media for biomedical, epidemiological, and
social phenomena information relevant to the multilevel complexity of human
health. We pay particular attention to topics where social media data analysis
has shown the most progress, including pharmacovigilance, sentiment analysis
especially for mental health, and other areas. We also discuss a variety of
innovative uses of social media data for health-related applications and
important limitations in social media data access and use.Comment: To appear in the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Scienc