Identifying the Targets of the Emotions Expressed in Health Forums

Abstract

Abstract. In the framework of the French project Patients' Mind, we focus on the semi-automatic analysis of online health forums. Online health forums are areas of exchange where patients, on condition of anonymity, can talk about their personal experiences freely. These resources are a gold mine for health professionals, giving them access to patient to patient exchanges, patient to health professional exchanges and even health professional to health professional exchanges. In this paper, we focus on the emotions expressed by the authors of the messages and more precisely on the targets of these emotions. We suggest an innovative method to identify these targets, based on the notion of semantic roles and using the FrameNet resource. Our method has been successfully validated on real data set.

Steps Toward Automatic Understanding of the Function of Affective Language in Support Groups

“…Medical support forums are one platform on which users generate emotion-rich content. People exchange factual information about elements such as treatments or hospitals, and provide emotional support to others with similar experiences (Bringay et al, 2014). This sharing through open discussion is known to be considerably beneficial (Pennebaker et al, 2001).…”

Predicting Medical Roles in Online Health Fora

“…The Text Mining and Natural Language Processing communities have extensively investigated the huge amount of data on online health fora for different purposes, such as: classifying lay requests to an internal medical expert [1], assisting moderators on online health fora [2], identifying sentiments and emotions [3], identifying the targets of the emotions [4], etc. Indeed, online health fora are increasingly visited by both sick and healthy users to get help and information related to their health [2].…”