Using Co-occurrence Analysis to Expand Consumer Health Vocabularies from Social Media Data

As health consumerism in the United States has remarkably risen over the past decade, more and more health consumers are actively seeking health related information on their own. However, health consumers´ efforts in seeking healthcare information could be challenging due to the lack of professional knowledge in medicine, and the gap between health professional vocabulary and health consumer vocabulary is one of the biggest issues. It has long been recognized that consumers and health professionals often express health concepts in different ways and consumers usually find it difficult to understand some medical terminologies or express themselves using the professional language for information seeking. To address this problem, many researchers have been working on developing Consumer Health Vocabulary (CHV) to bridge the language gap. One crucial step in developing CHV is the identification of consumer health expressions. Most of the methods used by existing studies in identifying consumer health expressions involve human efforts, which is very time-consuming. In this study, we propose an automatic method to identify consumer health expressions from consumer-contributed content, which represent consumers´ language the best. Co-occurrence analysis was used to identify terms that co-occur frequently with a set of seed terms. A corpus containing 120,393 discussion messages was used as a dataset and co-occurrence analysis was used to extract the most related consumer expressions. The experiment results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved a good performance in identifying consumer health expressions.