Connecting the Dots

Abstract

Online healthcare forums provide a valuable platform for people to discover knowledge. However, existing approaches rely on the syntactic information units, such as a sentence, a post, or a thread, to bind different pieces of information in a forum. In this work, we propose to connect the pieces of information by a semantic information unit, patients. Specifically, we connect the information of diseases, symptoms, treatments, and effects to the patient who experiences them, and thus enable effective knowledge discovery.