How do we talk about doctors and drugs? Sentiment Analysis in forums expressing opinions for medical domain

Objective The main goal of this study is to examine how people express their opinion in medical forums. We analyze the language used in order to determine the best way to tackle sentiment analysis in this domain. Methods We have applied supervised learning and lexicon-based sentiment analysis approa...

ver descrição completa

Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Jiménez Zafra, Salud María, Martín Valdivia, María Teresa, Molina González, M. Dolores, Ureña López, L. Alfonso
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Recursos:Universidad de Jaén
Repositorio:RUJA. Repositorio Institucional de la Producción Científica de la Universidad de Jaén
OAI Identifier:oai:ruja.ujaen.es:10953/7465
Acesso em linha:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artmed.2018.03.007
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0933365717305407
https://hdl.handle.net/10953/7465
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Spanish corpus
Patient opinions
Medical domain
Sentiment analysis
004
004.6
004.8
004.91
61
81
Descrição
Resumo:Objective The main goal of this study is to examine how people express their opinion in medical forums. We analyze the language used in order to determine the best way to tackle sentiment analysis in this domain. Methods We have applied supervised learning and lexicon-based sentiment analysis approaches over two different corpora extracted from social web. Specifically, we have focused on two aspects: drugs and doctors. We have selected two forums and we have collected corpora for each one: (i) DOS, a Spanish corpus of drug reviews and (ii) COPOS, a Spanish corpus of patients’ opinions about physicians. Results The classification results show that drug reviews are more difficult to classify than those about physicians. In order to understand the difference in the results, we have studied the linguistic features of both corpora. Conclusions Although opinions about physicians and drugs are written in most cases by non-professional users, reviews about physicians are characterized by the use of an informal language while reviews about drugs are characterized by a combination of informal language with specific terminology (e.g. adverse effects, drug names) with greater lexical diversity, making the task of sentiment analysis difficult.