Knowledge Discovery and Hypothesis Generation from Online Patient Forums: A Research Proposal

Abstract

The unprompted patient experiences shared on patient forums contain a wealth of unexploited knowledge. Mining this knowledge and crosslinking it with biomedical literature, could expose novel insights, which could subsequently provide hypotheses for further clinical research. As of yet, automated methods for open knowledge discovery on patient forum text are lacking. Thus, in this research proposal, we outline future research into methods for mining, aggregating and cross-linking patient knowledge from online forums. Additionally, we aim to address how one could measure the credibility of this extracted knowledge.