IEEE ICHI Healthcare Data Analytics Challenge
Bisakha Ray · 2015
There are several publicly accessible patient forums where patients can post questions related to their health conditions. The objective of this study was to develop a query-retrieval system that can mine such forums and identify existing questions most similar to the provided question. This pilot study based on a bag-of-words model with latent semantic analysis and cosine similarity suggests that text similarity-based mining holds promise for identification of diabetes-related questions from patient forums and informing self-care management. Further studies involving advance natural language processing tools can be used to reduce false positives and uncover semantically related questions.