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Natural Language Analysis of Online Health Forums

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Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis XVI (IDA 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10584))

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Abstract

Despite advances in concept extraction from free text, finding meaningful health related information from online patient forums still poses a significant challenge. Here we demonstrate how structured information can be extracted from posts found in such online health related forums by forming relationships between a drug/treatment and a symptom or side effect, including the polarity/sentiment of the patient. In particular, a rule-based natural language processing (NLP) system is deployed, where information in sentences is linked together though anaphora resolution. Our NLP relationship extraction system provides a strong baseline, achieving an \(\text {F}_1\) score of over 80% in discovering the said relationships that are present in the posts we analysed.

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Correspondence to Abul Hasan .

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Hasan, A., Levene, M., Weston, D.J. (2017). Natural Language Analysis of Online Health Forums. In: Adams, N., Tucker, A., Weston, D. (eds) Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis XVI. IDA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10584. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68765-0_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68765-0_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-68764-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-68765-0

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