Automatic extraction of informal topics from online suicidal ideation
Automatic extraction of informal topics from online suicidal ideation
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DOI：
10.1186/s12859-018-2197-z
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发表时间：
2018-06-13
影响因子：
3
通讯作者：
Fodeh, Samah J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Grant, Reilly N.;Kucher, David;Fodeh, Samah J.
背景：自杀是一个令人震惊的公共卫生问题，每年在全世界造成相当多的死亡。更多的人考虑自杀。了解与自杀相关的属性、特征和暴露仍然是一个紧迫而重要的问题。随着社交网站变得越来越普遍，用户开始在这些网站上谈论非常私人的话题，其中包括他们对自杀的看法。这些数据之前是通过分析社交媒体帖子的语言特征，并使用领域专家得出的因素来识别有风险的用户来评估的。结果：在这项工作中，我们自动提取了社交媒体帖子中发现的非正式的潜在反复出现的自杀意念主题。我们的评估表明，我们能够自动重现许多专家确定的自杀风险因素。此外，我们还发现了许多与自杀意念有关的非正式潜在话题，如对健康、工作、自我形象和财务问题的关注。结论：这些非正式的话题可以更具体或更普遍。我们的一些主题表达了有意义的想法，而不是包含在风险因素中，而一些风险因素没有互补的潜在主题。简而言之，我们对从社交媒体中提取的包含自杀想法的潜在主题的分析表明，这些系统的用户表达的想法与专家定义的主题是互补的，但在范围、焦点和语言的精确度上有所不同。
Background: Suicide is an alarming public health problem accounting for a considerable number of deaths each year worldwide. Many more individuals contemplate suicide. Understanding the attributes, characteristics, and exposures correlated with suicide remains an urgent and significant problem. As social networking sites have become more common, users have adopted these sites to talk about intensely personal topics, among them their thoughts about suicide. Such data has previously been evaluated by analyzing the language features of social media posts and using factors derived by domain experts to identify at-risk users.Results: In this work, we automatically extract informal latent recurring topics of suicidal ideation found in social media posts. Our evaluation demonstrates that we are able to automatically reproduce many of the expertly determined risk factors for suicide. Moreover, we identify many informal latent topics related to suicide ideation such as concerns over health, work, self-image, and financial issues.Conclusions: These informal topics topics can be more specific or more general. Some of our topics express meaningful ideas not contained in the risk factors and some risk factors do not have complimentary latent topics. In short, our analysis of the latent topics extracted from social media containing suicidal ideations suggests that users of these systems express ideas that are complementary to the topics defined by experts but differ in their scope, focus, and precision of language.