Mining Themes and Interests in the Asperger's and Autism Community

Abstract

Discussion forums offer a new source of insight for the experiences and challenges faced by individuals affected by mental disorders. Language technology can help domain experts gather insight from these forums, by aggregating themes and user behaviors across thousands of conversations. We present a novel model for web forums, which captures both thematic content as well as user-specific interests. Applying this model to the Aspies Central forum (which covers issues related to Asperger's syndrome and autism spectrum disorder), we identify several topics of concern to individuals who report being on the autism spectrum. We perform the evaluation on the data collected from Aspies Central forum, including 1,939 threads, 29,947 posts and 972 users. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the topics extracted by this model are substantially more than those obtained by Latent Dirichlet Allocation and the Author-Topic Model. Qualitative analysis by subject-matter experts suggests intriguing directions for future investigation.