On the Computational Study of Chinese Alzheimer's Disease Online Communities
Qiming Sun, Tiffany Y. Tang · 2018
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease affecting millions of people worldwide. There are very few published systematic prevalence studies of AD in China which claims the most AD cases worldwide. Our understandings on the public awareness, challenges and problems of the AD population faces and knowledge held among the general public and medical professionals are even rare which motivates the present study. In particular, to research the current situation of AD communities in China, this present study proposes several data mining and natural language processing techniques (including sentiment analysis and named entity recognition) on the posts in two popular Chinese forums. The computational analysis results revealed the varying attentions that AD communities receive from the society, the users' collective emotion state, the problems and challenges the population is facing and some common patterns from across the general public and medical professions. Our computational studies, one of the very few in the literature, can facilitate the acknowledgment and understanding of the disease for everyone in the society and provide policy-makers and commercial companies with some insights and urging needs of the population.