Automated learning of everyday patients' language for medical blogs analytics

Abstract

Analyzing how people discuss about health-related topics on dedicated forums and social networks such as Twitter, can provide valuable insight for syndromic surveillance and to predict disease outbreaks. In this paper we present a minimally trained algorithm to learn associations between technical and everyday language terms, based on pattern generalization and complete linkage clustering, and we then assess its utility on a case study of five common syndromes for surveillance purposes.