A Three-Step Procedural Paradigm for Domain-Specific Social Media Slang Analytics
Aishwarya Sundaram, Hema Subramaniam, Siti Hafizah Ab Hamid, Azmawaty Mohamad Nor · 2024
Social media is a crucial aspect of modern society, shaping global communication and information exchange. Social media slang encompasses informal language expressions, abbreviations, and unconventional words on these platforms, serving purposes such as concise communication and identity establishment. Data analytics from social media slang plays a vital role in providing real-time trends, enhancing sentiment analysis, and improving the accuracy of predictive models by capturing evolving linguistic trends. This study aims to address gaps in existing social media slang analytics by proposing a three-step process for extracting and validating domain-specific social media slang terms, specifically focusing on the domain of anxiety prediction in the context of mental health. The proposed approach involves the identification of relevant users, extraction of social media slang terms, and validation by subject matter experts. A pilot study is conducted in the domain of anxiety prediction, employing a self-prepared questionnaire and involving participants aged 13-14 from schools in Selangor, Malaysia. The pilot study identifies ten social media slang terms associated with anxiety, validated by subject matter experts who are licensed mental health practitioners. The slang terms exhibit varying prevalence levels among adolescents, with some terms absent from popular slang dictionaries like Urban Dictionary. The findings highlight the need for extracting slang terms from pertinent users and subject matter expert validation in incorporating social media slang into more appropriate predictive analytics.