Using spontaneously generated online patient experiences to improve healthcare : A case study using Modafinil

Background Acknowledged issues with the RCT focus of EBM and recognition of the value of patient input have created a need for new methods of knowledge generation that can give the depth of qualitative studies but on a much larger scale. Almost half of the global population uses social media regularly, with increasing numbers of people using online spaces as either a first- or second-line health information and exchange resource. Estimates suggest the volume of online health related data grew by 300% between 2017 and 2020. As a data source, this unstructured freeform textual data is a form of patient generated health data, containing a mass of patient centred, contextually grounded detail about the perceptions and health concerns of those who post online. Methods for analysing it are at an early stage of development, but it is seen as having potential to add to clinical understanding, either by augmenting existing knowledge, or in aiding understanding of real-world usage of healthcare interventions and services. Objectives To explore how large-scale analysis of SGOPE can help with understanding patient perspectives of their conditions, symptoms, and self-management behaviours, assess the effectiveness of interventions, contribute to the process of knowledge and evidence creation, and consequently help healthcare systems improve outcomes in the most efficient manner. A secondary aim is to contribute to the development of methods that can be generalised across other interventions or services. Methods Using Modafinil as a case study, a multistage approach was taken. First, an exploratory study, comparing both qualitative and basic NLP techniques was undertaken on a small sample of 260 posts to identify topics, evaluate effectiveness and identify perceived causal text. An umbrella scoping review was then undertaken exploring how and for what purposes SGOPE data is currently being used within healthcare research. Findings from both then guided the main study, which used a variety of unsupervised NLP tools to explore the main dataset of over 69k posts. Individual methods were compared against each other. Results from both studies were compared and for evaluation. Results In contrast to the existing inconclusive systematic review evidence for Modafinil for anything other than narcolepsy, both studies found that Modafinil is seen as by posters as effective in treating fatigue and cognition symptoms in a wide range of conditions. Both identified the topics mentioned in the data, although more work needs to be done to develop the NLP methods to achieve a greater depth of understanding. The first study identified eight themes within the posts: reason for taking, impact of symptoms, acquisition, dosage, side-effects, comparison with other interventions, effectiveness, and quality of life outcomes. Effectiveness of Modafinil was found to be 68% positive, 12% mixed and 18% negative. Expressions of causal belief were identified. In the main study, effectiveness was measured with sentiment analysis, with all methods showing strong positive sentiment. Topic modelling identified groups of themes. Linguistic techniques extracted phrases indicating causality. Various analysis methods were compared to develop a method that could be generalised across other health topics

Novel Natural Language Processing Models for Medical Terms and Symptoms Detection in Twitter

This dissertation focuses on disambiguation of language use on Twitter about drug use, consumption types of drugs, drug legalization, ontology-enhanced approaches, and prediction analysis of data-driven by developing novel NLP models. Three technical aims comprise this work: (a) leveraging pattern recognition techniques to improve the quality and quantity of crawled Twitter posts related to drug abuse; (b) using an expert-curated, domain-specific DsOn ontology model that improve knowledge extraction in the form of drug-to-symptom and drug-to-side effect relations; and (c) modeling the prediction of public perception of the drug’s legalization and the sentiment analysis of drug consumption on Twitter. We collected 7.5 million data from August 2015 to March 2016. This work leveraged a longstanding, multidisciplinary collaboration between researchers at the Population & Center for Interventions, Treatment, and Addictions Research (CITAR) in the Boonshoft School of Medicine and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. In addition, we aimed to develop and deploy an innovative prediction analysis algorithm for eDrugTrends, capable of semi-automated processing of Twitter data to identify emerging trends in cannabis and synthetic cannabinoid use in the U.S. In addition, the study included aim four, a use case study defined by tweets content analyzing PLWH, medication patterns, and identifying keyword trends via Twitter-based, user-generated content. This case study leveraged a multidisciplinary collaboration between researchers at the Departments of Family Medicine and Population and Public Health Sciences at Wright State University’s Boonshoft School of Medicine and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. We collected 65K data from February 2022 to July 2022 with the U.S.-based HIV knowledge domain recruited via the Twitter API streaming platform. For knowledge discovery, domain knowledge plays a significant role in powering many intelligent frameworks, such as data analysis, information retrieval, and pattern recognition. Recent NLP and semantic web advances have contributed to extending the domain knowledge of medical terms. These techniques required a bag of seeds for medical knowledge discovery. Various initiate seeds create irrelevant data to the noise and negatively impact the prediction analysis performance. The methodology of aim one, PatRDis classifier, applied for noisy and ambiguous issues, and aim two, DsOn Ontology model, applied for semantic parsing and enriching the online medical to classify the data for HIV care medications engagement and symptom detection from Twitter. By applying the methodology of aims 2 and 3, we solved the challenges of ambiguity and explored more than 1500 cannabis and cannabinoid slang terms. Sentiments measured preceding the election, such as states with high levels of positive sentiment preceding the election who were engaged in enhancing their legalization status. we also used the same dataset for prediction analysis for marijuana legalization and consumption trend analysis (Ohio public polling data). In Aim 4, we applied three experiments, ensemble-learning, the RNN-LSM, the NNBERT-CNN models, and five techniques to determine the tweets associated with medication adherence and HIV symptoms. The long short-term memory (LSTM) model and the CNN for sentence classification produce accurate results and have been recently used in NLP tasks. CNN models use convolutional layers and maximum pooling or max-overtime pooling layers to extract higher-level features, while LSTM models can capture long-term dependencies between word sequences hence are better used for text classification. We propose attention-based RNN, MLP, and CNN deep learning models that capitalize on the advantages of LSTM and BERT techniques with an additional attention mechanism. We trained the model using NNBERT to evaluate the proposed model\u27s performance. The test results showed that the proposed models produce more accurate classification results, and BERT obtained higher recall and F1 scores than MLP or LSTM models. In addition, We developed an intelligent tool capable of automated processing of Twitter data to identify emerging trends in HIV disease, HIV symptoms, and medication adherence

Innovative Heuristics to Improve the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Methodology for Textual Analysis and a New Modernized Topic Modeling Approach

Natural Language Processing is a complex method of data mining the vast trove of documents created and made available every day. Topic modeling seeks to identify the topics within textual corpora with limited human input into the process to speed analysis. Current topic modeling techniques used in Natural Language Processing have limitations in the pre-processing steps. This dissertation studies topic modeling techniques, those limitations in the pre-processing, and introduces new algorithms to gain improvements from existing topic modeling techniques while being competitive with computational complexity. This research introduces four contributions to the field of Natural Language Processing and topic modeling. First, this research identifies a requirement for a more robust “stopwords” list and proposes a heuristic for creating a more robust list. Second, a new dimensionality-reduction technique is introduced that exploits the number of words within a document to infer importance to word choice. Third, an algorithm is developed to determine the number of topics within a corpus and demonstrated using a standard topic modeling data set. These techniques produce a higher quality result from the Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling technique. Fourth, a novel heuristic utilizing Principal Component Analysis is introduced that is capable of determining the number of topics within a corpus that produces stable sets of topic words

Knowledge Extraction from Textual Resources through Semantic Web Tools and Advanced Machine Learning Algorithms for Applications in Various Domains

Nowadays there is a tremendous amount of unstructured data, often represented by texts, which is created and stored in variety of forms in many domains such as patients' health records, social networks comments, scientific publications, and so on. This volume of data represents an invaluable source of knowledge, but unfortunately it is challenging its mining for machines. At the same time, novel tools as well as advanced methodologies have been introduced in several domains, improving the efficacy and the efficiency of data-based services. Following this trend, this thesis shows how to parse data from text with Semantic Web based tools, feed data into Machine Learning methodologies, and produce services or resources to facilitate the execution of some tasks. More precisely, the use of Semantic Web technologies powered by Machine Learning algorithms has been investigated in the Healthcare and E-Learning domains through not yet experimented methodologies. Furthermore, this thesis investigates the use of some state-of-the-art tools to move data from texts to graphs for representing the knowledge contained in scientific literature. Finally, the use of a Semantic Web ontology and novel heuristics to detect insights from biological data in form of graph are presented. The thesis contributes to the scientific literature in terms of results and resources. Most of the material presented in this thesis derives from research papers published in international journals or conference proceedings

Metric for seleting the number of topics in the LDA Model

The latest technological trends are driving a vast and growing amount of textual data. Topic modeling is a useful tool for extracting information from large corpora of text. A topic template is based on a corpus of documents, discovers the topics that permeate the corpus and assigns documents to those topics. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model is the main, or most popular, of the probabilistic topic models. The LDA model is conditioned by three parameters: two Dirichlet hyperparameters (α and β ) and the number of topics (K). Determining the parameter K is extremely important and not extensively explored in the literature, mainly due to the intensive computation and long processing time. Most topic modeling methods implicitly assume that the number of topics is known in advance, thus considering it demands an exogenous parameter. That is annoying, leaving the technique prone to subjectivities. The quality of insights offered by LDA is quite sensitive to the value of the parameter K, and perhaps an excess of subjectivity in its choice might influence the confidence managers put on the techniques results, thus undermining its usage by firms. This dissertation’s main objective is to develop a metric to identify the ideal value for the parameter K of the LDA model that allows an adequate representation of the corpus and within a tolerable elapsed time of the process. We apply the proposed metric alongside existing metrics to two datasets. Experiments show that the proposed method selects a number of topics similar to that of other metrics, but with better performance in terms of processing time. Although each metric has its own method for determining the number of topics, some results are similar for the same database, as evidenced in the study. Our metric is superior when considering the processing time. Experiments show this method is effective.As tendências tecnológicas mais recentes impulsionam uma vasta e crescente quantidade de dados textuais. Modelagem de tópicos é uma ferramenta útil para extrair informações relevantes de grandes corpora de texto. Um modelo de tópico é baseado em um corpus de documentos, descobre os tópicos que permeiam o corpus e atribui documentos a esses tópicos. O modelo de Alocação de Dirichlet Latente (LDA) é o principal, ou mais popular, dos modelos de tópicos probabilísticos. O modelo LDA é condicionado por três parâmetros: os hiperparâmetros de Dirichlet (α and β ) e o número de tópicos (K). A determinação do parâmetro K é extremamente importante e pouco explorada na literatura, principalmente devido à computação intensiva e ao longo tempo de processamento. A maioria dos métodos de modelagem de tópicos assume implicitamente que o número de tópicos é conhecido com antecedência, portanto, considerando que exige um parâmetro exógeno. Isso é um tanto complicado para o pesquisador pois acaba acrescentando à técnica uma subjetividade. A qualidade dos insights oferecidos pelo LDA é bastante sensível ao valor do parâmetro K, e pode-se argumentar que um excesso de subjetividade em sua escolha possa influenciar a confiança que os gerentes depositam nos resultados da técnica, prejudicando assim seu uso pelas empresas. O principal objetivo desta dissertação é desenvolver uma métrica para identificar o valor ideal para o parâmetro K do modelo LDA que permita uma representação adequada do corpus e dentro de um tempo de processamento tolerável. Embora cada métrica possua método próprio para determinação do número de tópicos, alguns resultados são semelhantes para a mesma base de dados, conforme evidenciado no estudo. Nossa métrica é superior ao considerar o tempo de processamento. Experimentos mostram que esse método é eficaz

Application of Common Sense Computing for the Development of a Novel Knowledge-Based Opinion Mining Engine

The ways people express their opinions and sentiments have radically changed in the past few years thanks to the advent of social networks, web communities, blogs, wikis and other online collaborative media. The distillation of knowledge from this huge amount of unstructured information can be a key factor for marketers who want to create an image or identity in the minds of their customers for their product, brand, or organisation. These online social data, however, remain hardly accessible to computers, as they are specifically meant for human consumption. The automatic analysis of online opinions, in fact, involves a deep understanding of natural language text by machines, from which we are still very far. Hitherto, online information retrieval has been mainly based on algorithms relying on the textual representation of web-pages. Such algorithms are very good at retrieving texts, splitting them into parts, checking the spelling and counting their words. But when it comes to interpreting sentences and extracting meaningful information, their capabilities are known to be very limited. Existing approaches to opinion mining and sentiment analysis, in particular, can be grouped into three main categories: keyword spotting, in which text is classified into categories based on the presence of fairly unambiguous affect words; lexical affinity, which assigns arbitrary words a probabilistic affinity for a particular emotion; statistical methods, which calculate the valence of affective keywords and word co-occurrence frequencies on the base of a large training corpus. Early works aimed to classify entire documents as containing overall positive or negative polarity, or rating scores of reviews. Such systems were mainly based on supervised approaches relying on manually labelled samples, such as movie or product reviews where the opinionist’s overall positive or negative attitude was explicitly indicated. However, opinions and sentiments do not occur only at document level, nor they are limited to a single valence or target. Contrary or complementary attitudes toward the same topic or multiple topics can be present across the span of a document. In more recent works, text analysis granularity has been taken down to segment and sentence level, e.g., by using presence of opinion-bearing lexical items (single words or n-grams) to detect subjective sentences, or by exploiting association rule mining for a feature-based analysis of product reviews. These approaches, however, are still far from being able to infer the cognitive and affective information associated with natural language as they mainly rely on knowledge bases that are still too limited to efficiently process text at sentence level. In this thesis, common sense computing techniques are further developed and applied to bridge the semantic gap between word-level natural language data and the concept-level opinions conveyed by these. In particular, the ensemble application of graph mining and multi-dimensionality reduction techniques on two common sense knowledge bases was exploited to develop a novel intelligent engine for open-domain opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The proposed approach, termed sentic computing, performs a clause-level semantic analysis of text, which allows the inference of both the conceptual and emotional information associated with natural language opinions and, hence, a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data. The engine was tested on three different resources, namely a Twitter hashtag repository, a LiveJournal database and a PatientOpinion dataset, and its performance compared both with results obtained using standard sentiment analysis techniques and using different state-of-the-art knowledge bases such as Princeton’s WordNet, MIT’s ConceptNet and Microsoft’s Probase. Differently from most currently available opinion mining services, the developed engine does not base its analysis on a limited set of affect words and their co-occurrence frequencies, but rather on common sense concepts and the cognitive and affective valence conveyed by these. This allows the engine to be domain-independent and, hence, to be embedded in any opinion mining system for the development of intelligent applications in multiple fields such as Social Web, HCI and e-health. Looking ahead, the combined novel use of different knowledge bases and of common sense reasoning techniques for opinion mining proposed in this work, will, eventually, pave the way for development of more bio-inspired approaches to the design of natural language processing systems capable of handling knowledge, retrieving it when necessary, making analogies and learning from experience

Application of Common Sense Computing for the Development of a Novel Knowledge-Based Opinion Mining Engine

The ways people express their opinions and sentiments have radically changed in the past few years thanks to the advent of social networks, web communities, blogs, wikis and other online collaborative media. The distillation of knowledge from this huge amount of unstructured information can be a key factor for marketers who want to create an image or identity in the minds of their customers for their product, brand, or organisation. These online social data, however, remain hardly accessible to computers, as they are specifically meant for human consumption. The automatic analysis of online opinions, in fact, involves a deep understanding of natural language text by machines, from which we are still very far. Hitherto, online information retrieval has been mainly based on algorithms relying on the textual representation of web-pages. Such algorithms are very good at retrieving texts, splitting them into parts, checking the spelling and counting their words. But when it comes to interpreting sentences and extracting meaningful information, their capabilities are known to be very limited. Existing approaches to opinion mining and sentiment analysis, in particular, can be grouped into three main categories: keyword spotting, in which text is classified into categories based on the presence of fairly unambiguous affect words; lexical affinity, which assigns arbitrary words a probabilistic affinity for a particular emotion; statistical methods, which calculate the valence of affective keywords and word co-occurrence frequencies on the base of a large training corpus. Early works aimed to classify entire documents as containing overall positive or negative polarity, or rating scores of reviews. Such systems were mainly based on supervised approaches relying on manually labelled samples, such as movie or product reviews where the opinionist’s overall positive or negative attitude was explicitly indicated. However, opinions and sentiments do not occur only at document level, nor they are limited to a single valence or target. Contrary or complementary attitudes toward the same topic or multiple topics can be present across the span of a document. In more recent works, text analysis granularity has been taken down to segment and sentence level, e.g., by using presence of opinion-bearing lexical items (single words or n-grams) to detect subjective sentences, or by exploiting association rule mining for a feature-based analysis of product reviews. These approaches, however, are still far from being able to infer the cognitive and affective information associated with natural language as they mainly rely on knowledge bases that are still too limited to efficiently process text at sentence level. In this thesis, common sense computing techniques are further developed and applied to bridge the semantic gap between word-level natural language data and the concept-level opinions conveyed by these. In particular, the ensemble application of graph mining and multi-dimensionality reduction techniques on two common sense knowledge bases was exploited to develop a novel intelligent engine for open-domain opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The proposed approach, termed sentic computing, performs a clause-level semantic analysis of text, which allows the inference of both the conceptual and emotional information associated with natural language opinions and, hence, a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data. The engine was tested on three different resources, namely a Twitter hashtag repository, a LiveJournal database and a PatientOpinion dataset, and its performance compared both with results obtained using standard sentiment analysis techniques and using different state-of-the-art knowledge bases such as Princeton’s WordNet, MIT’s ConceptNet and Microsoft’s Probase. Differently from most currently available opinion mining services, the developed engine does not base its analysis on a limited set of affect words and their co-occurrence frequencies, but rather on common sense concepts and the cognitive and affective valence conveyed by these. This allows the engine to be domain-independent and, hence, to be embedded in any opinion mining system for the development of intelligent applications in multiple fields such as Social Web, HCI and e-health. Looking ahead, the combined novel use of different knowledge bases and of common sense reasoning techniques for opinion mining proposed in this work, will, eventually, pave the way for development of more bio-inspired approaches to the design of natural language processing systems capable of handling knowledge, retrieving it when necessary, making analogies and learning from experience

Sensing Human Sentiment via Social Media Images: Methodologies and Applications

abstract: Social media refers computer-based technology that allows the sharing of information and building the virtual networks and communities. With the development of internet based services and applications, user can engage with social media via computer and smart mobile devices. In recent years, social media has taken the form of different activities such as social network, business network, text sharing, photo sharing, blogging, etc. With the increasing popularity of social media, it has accumulated a large amount of data which enables understanding the human behavior possible. Compared with traditional survey based methods, the analysis of social media provides us a golden opportunity to understand individuals at scale and in turn allows us to design better services that can tailor to individuals’ needs. From this perspective, we can view social media as sensors, which provides online signals from a virtual world that has no geographical boundaries for the real world individual's activity. One of the key features for social media is social, where social media users actively interact to each via generating content and expressing the opinions, such as post and comment in Facebook. As a result, sentiment analysis, which refers a computational model to identify, extract or characterize subjective information expressed in a given piece of text, has successfully employs user signals and brings many real world applications in different domains such as e-commerce, politics, marketing, etc. The goal of sentiment analysis is to classify a user’s attitude towards various topics into positive, negative or neutral categories based on textual data in social media. However, recently, there is an increasing number of people start to use photos to express their daily life on social media platforms like Flickr and Instagram. Therefore, analyzing the sentiment from visual data is poise to have great improvement for user understanding. In this dissertation, I study the problem of understanding human sentiments from large scale collection of social images based on both image features and contextual social network features. We show that neither visual features nor the textual features are by themselves sufficient for accurate sentiment prediction. Therefore, we provide a way of using both of them, and formulate sentiment prediction problem in two scenarios: supervised and unsupervised. We first show that the proposed framework has flexibility to incorporate multiple modalities of information and has the capability to learn from heterogeneous features jointly with sufficient training data. Secondly, we observe that negative sentiment may related to human mental health issues. Based on this observation, we aim to understand the negative social media posts, especially the post related to depression e.g., self-harm content. Our analysis, the first of its kind, reveals a number of important findings. Thirdly, we extend the proposed sentiment prediction task to a general multi-label visual recognition task to demonstrate the methodology flexibility behind our sentiment analysis model.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Quantifying the impact of Twitter activity in political battlegrounds

It may be challenging to determine the reach of the information, how well it corresponds with the domain design, and how to utilize it as a communication medium when utilizing social media platforms, notably Twitter, to engage the public in advocating a parliament act, or during a global health emergency. Chapter 3 offers a broad overview of how candidates running in the 2020 US Elections used Twitter as a communication tool to interact with voters. More precisely, it seeks to identify components related to internal collaboration and public participation (in terms of content and stance similarity among the candidates from the same political front and to the official Twitter accounts of their political parties). The 2020 US Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates from the two main political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, are our main subjects. Along with the content similarity, their tweets were assessed for social reach and stance similarity on 22 topics. This study complements previous research on efficiently using social media platforms for election campaigns. Chapter 4 empirically examines the online social associations of the top-10 COVID-19 resilient nations’ leaders and healthcare institutions based on the Bloomberg COVID-19 Resilience Ranking. In order to measure the strength of the online social association in terms of public engagement, sentiment strength, inclusivity and diversity, we used the attributes provided by Twitter Academic Research API, coupled with the tweets of leaders and healthcare organizations from these nations. Understanding how leaders and healthcare organizations may utilize Twitter to establish digital connections with the public during health emergencies is made more accessible by this study. The thesis has proposed methods for efficiently using Twitter in various domains, utilizing the implementations of various Language Models and several data mining and analytics techniques