Identifying the targets of the emotions expressed in health forums

Abstract

In the framework of the French project Patients' Mind, we focus on the semi-automatic analysis of online health forums. Online health forums are areas of exchange where patients, on condition of anonymity, can talk about their personal experiences freely. These resources are a gold mine for health professionals, giving them access to patient to patient exchanges, patient to health professional exchanges and even health professional to health professional exchanges. In this paper, we focus on the emotions expressed by the authors of the messages and more precisely on the targets of these emotions. We suggest an innovative method to identify these targets, based on the notion of semantic roles and using the FrameNet resource. Our method has been successfully validated on real data set. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.