Online health communities (OHCs) have become a medium for patients to share their personal experiences and interact with peers on topics related to a disease, medication, side effects, and therapeutic processes. Many studies show that using OHCs regularly decreases mortality and improves patients mental health. As a result of their benefits, OHCs are a popular place for patients to refer to, especially patients with a severe disease, and to receive emotional and informational support. The main reasons for developing OHCs are to present valid and high-quality information and to understand the mechanism of social support in changing patients' mental health. Given the purpose of OHC moderators for developing OHCs applications and the purpose of patients for using OHCs, there is no facility, feature, or sub-application in OHCs to satisfy patient and moderator goals. OHCs are only equipped with a primary search engine that is a keyword-based search tool. In other words, if a patient wants to obtain information about a side-effect, he/she needs to browse many threads in the hope that he/she can find several related comments. In the same way, OHC moderators cannot browse all information which is exchanged among patients to validate their accuracy. Thus, it is critical for OHCs to be equipped with computational tools which are supported by several sophisticated computational models that provide moderators and patients with the collection of messages that they need for making decisions or predictions. We present multiple computational models to alleviate the problem of OHCs in providing specific types of messages in response to the specific moderator and patient needs. Specifically, we focused on proposing computational models for the following tasks: identifying emotional support, which presents OHCs moderators, psychologists, and sociologists with insightful views on the emotional states of individuals and groups, and identifying informational support, which provides patients with an efficient and effective tool for accessing the best-fit messages from a huge amount of patient posts to satisfy their information needs, as well as provides OHC moderators, health-practitioners, nurses, and doctors with an insightful view about the current discussion under the topics of side-effects and therapeutic processes, giving them an opportunity to monitor and validate the exchange of information in OHCs. We proposed hybrid models that combine high-level, abstract features extracted from convolutional neural networks with lexicon-based features and features extracted from long short-term memory networks to capture the semantics of the data. We show that our models, with and without lexicon-based features, outperform strong baselines.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc1157594 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Khan Pour, Hamed |
| Contributors | Buckles, Bill, Caragea, Cornelia, Tarau, Paul, Fu, Song |
| Publisher | University of North Texas |
| Source Sets | University of North Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | viii, 87 pages, Text |
| Rights | Public, Khan Pour, Hamed, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved. |
Page generated in 0.0018 seconds