Abstract
BackgroundSocial media platforms constitute a rich data source for natural language processing tasks such as named entity recognition, relation extraction, and sentiment analysis. In particular, social media platforms about health provide a different insight into patient’s experiences with diseases and treatment than those found in the scientific literature.ObjectiveThis paper aimed to report a study of entities related to chronic diseases and their relation in user-generated text posts. The major focus of our research is the study of biomedical entities found in health social media platforms and their relations and the way people suffering from chronic diseases express themselves.MethodsWe collected a corpus of 17,624 text posts from disease-specific subreddits of the social news and discussion website Reddit. For entity and relation extraction from this corpus, we employed the PKDE4J tool developed by Song et al (2015). PKDE4J is a text mining system that integrates dictionary-based entity extraction and rule-based relation extraction in a highly flexible and extensible framework.ResultsUsing PKDE4J, we extracted 2 types of entities and relations: biomedical entities and relations and subject-predicate-object entity relations. In total, 82,138 entities and 30,341 relation pairs were extracted from the Reddit dataset. The most highly mentioned entities were those related to oncological disease (2884 occurrences of cancer) and asthma (2180 occurrences). The relation pair anatomy-disease was the most frequent (5550 occurrences), the highest frequent entities in this pair being cancer and lymph. The manual validation of the extracted entities showed a very good performance of the system at the entity extraction task (3682/5151, 71.48% extracted entities were correctly labeled).ConclusionsThis study showed that people are eager to share their personal experience with chronic diseases on social media platforms despite possible privacy and security issues. The results reported in this paper are promising and demonstrate the need for more in-depth studies on the way patients with chronic diseases express themselves on social media platforms.
Highlights
BackgroundPeople are often concerned about their health status and a range of medical issues, especially when it comes to complex or chronic diseases that can take a long time to treat or monitor
The results reported in this paper are promising and demonstrate the need for more in-depth studies on the way patients with chronic diseases express themselves on social media platforms. (J Med Internet Res 2019;21(6):e12876) doi:10.2196/12876
J Med Internet Res 2019 | vol 21 | iss. 6 | e12876 | p.13 information extraction approach using the PKDE4J tool to detect, extract, and visualize chronic disease entities and relations and to identify characteristics of the social media language in a corpus collected from Reddit
Summary
BackgroundPeople are often concerned about their health status and a range of medical issues, especially when it comes to complex or chronic diseases that can take a long time to treat or monitor. Social media platforms may support patients in their search for medical products or provide suggestions to promote healthy behavior and can improve health education as they allow people to write about their experiences with diseases, drugs, symptoms, and treatments. The major focus of our research is the study of biomedical entities found in health social media platforms and their relations and the way people suffering from chronic diseases express themselves. Conclusions: This study showed that people are eager to share their personal experience with chronic diseases on social media platforms despite possible privacy and security issues. The results reported in this paper are promising and demonstrate the need for more in-depth studies on the way patients with chronic diseases express themselves on social media platforms
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