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Food is an integral part of our lives, cultures, and well-being, and is of major interest to public health. The collection of daily nutritional data involves keeping detailed diaries or periodic surveys and is limited in scope and reach.…
Social media based digital epidemiology has the potential to support faster response and deeper understanding of public health related threats. This study proposes a new framework to analyze unstructured health related textual data via…
Social networks are vital for information sharing, especially in the health sector for discussing diseases and treatments. These platforms, however, often feature posts as brief texts, posing challenges for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in…
Semantic sentence embeddings are usually supervisedly built minimizing distances between pairs of embeddings of sentences labelled as semantically similar by annotators. Since big labelled datasets are rare, in particular for non-English…
To use social media for health-related analysis, one key step is the detection of health-related labels for users. But unlike transient conditions like flu, social media users are less vocal about chronic conditions such as obesity, as…
We study how language on social media is linked to diseases such as atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD), diabetes and various types of cancer. Our proposed model leverages state-of-the-art sentence embeddings, followed by a regression model…
Social media data provides propitious opportunities for public health research. However, studies suggest that disparities may exist in the representation of certain populations (e.g., people of lower socioeconomic status). To quantify and…
A word embedding is a low-dimensional, dense and real- valued vector representation of a word. Word embeddings have been used in many NLP tasks. They are usually gener- ated from a large text corpus. The embedding of a word cap- tures both…
Multiview representation learning of data can help construct coherent and contextualized users' representations on social media. This paper suggests a joint embedding model, incorporating users' social and textual information to learn…
An increasing number of people use wearables and other smart devices to quantify various health conditions, ranging from sleep patterns, to body weight, to heart rates. Of these Quantified Selfs many choose to openly share their data via…
We investigate the predictive power behind the language of food on social media. We collect a corpus of over three million food-related posts from Twitter and demonstrate that many latent population characteristics can be directly predicted…
Mental illnesses adversely affect a significant proportion of the population worldwide. However, the methods traditionally used for estimating and characterizing the prevalence of mental health conditions are time-consuming and expensive.…
Social media has become an emerging alternative to opinion polls for public opinion collection, while it is still posing many challenges as a passive data source, such as structurelessness, quantifiability, and representativeness. Social…
Government-sponsored policy-making and scheme generations is one of the means of protecting and promoting the social, economic, and personal development of the citizens. The evaluation of effectiveness of these schemes done by government…
Foodborne illness is a serious but preventable public health problem -- with delays in detecting the associated outbreaks resulting in productivity loss, expensive recalls, public safety hazards, and even loss of life. While social media is…
Several projects have shown the feasibility to use textual social media data to track public health concerns, such as temporal influenza patterns or geographical obesity patterns. In this paper, we look at whether geo-tagged images from…
Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in harnessing Twitter data for dynamic monitoring of traffic conditions. Bag-of-words representation is a common method in literature for tweet modeling and retrieving traffic…
Obesity and diabetes epidemics are affecting about a third and tenth of US population, respectively, capturing the attention of the nation and its institutions. Social media provides an open forum for communication between individuals and…
Social media platforms provide convenient means for users to participate in multiple online activities on various contents and create fast widespread interactions. However, this rapidly growing access has also increased the diverse…
As the problem of drug abuse intensifies in the U.S., many studies that primarily utilize social media data, such as postings on Twitter, to study drug abuse-related activities use machine learning as a powerful tool for text classification…