Computational methods for mining health communications in web 2.0

Data from social media platforms are being actively mined for trends and patterns of interests. Problems such as sentiment analysis and prediction of election outcomes have become tremendously popular due to the unprecedented availability of social interactivity data of different types. In this thesis we address two problems that have been relatively unexplored. The first problem relates to mining beliefs, in particular health beliefs, and their surveillance using social media. The second problem relates to investigation of factors associated with engagement of U.S. Federal Health Agencies via Twitter and Facebook.

In addressing the first problem we propose a novel computational framework for belief surveillance. This framework can be used for 1) surveillance of any given belief in the form of a probe, and 2) automatically harvesting health-related probes. We present our estimates of support, opposition and doubt for these probes some of which represent true information, in the sense that they are supported by scientific evidence, others represent false information and the remaining represent debatable propositions. We show for example that the levels of support in false and debatable probes are surprisingly high. We also study the scientific novelty of these probes and find that some of the harvested probes with sparse scientific evidence may indicate novel hypothesis. We also show the suitability of off-the-shelf classifiers for belief surveillance. We find these classifiers are quite generalizable and can be used for classifying newly harvested probes. Finally, we show the ability of harvesting and tracking probes over time. Although our work is focused in health care, the approach is broadly applicable to other domains as well.

For the second problem, our specific goals are to study factors associated with the amount and duration of engagement of organizations. We use negative binomial hurdle regression models and Cox proportional hazards survival models for these. For Twitter, the hurdle analysis shows that presence of user-mention is positively associated with the amount of engagement while negative sentiment has inverse association. Content of tweets is also equally important for engagement. The survival analyses indicate that engagement duration is positively associated with follower count. For Facebook, both hurdle and survival analyses show that number of page likes and positive sentiment are correlated with higher and prolonged engagement while few content types are negatively correlated with engagement. We also find patterns of engagement that are consistent across Twitter and Facebook.