Some Dartmouth researchers are using “natural language processing—artificial intelligence techniques focused on human linguistics—to extract meaningful information from health-related social media interactions” and are trying it out on “posts from a Reddit forum where users discuss their experience related to opioid use disorder treatment that uses FDA-approved medications.”
This intrigued me because I’m a Reddit user – I have 47K karma! if that means anything to you – so I’m familiar with the way its users can spew out some crazy baloney at times. Getting “meaningful information” out of a Reddit forum is tricky, at best.
Dartmouth News has a big piece of how a trio of computer scientists, Omar Sharif, Sarah Preum and Madhusudan Basakare, are proceeding – you can read it here.
They’re concentrating on descriptions of people’s interactions with medication, using a “human in the loop” system to help categorize and filter comments, which they hope can help “improve communication between clinicians and patients and empowering patients to connect to care.”
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