Analysis of Twitter to Identify Topics Related to Eating Disorder Symptoms

Sicheng Zhou, Yunpeng Zhao, Rubina Rizvi, Jiang Bian, Ann F. Haynos, Rui Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

Eating disorders (EDs) are serious mental illnesses associated with physical and psychiatric problems, and premature death. Examining social media communication about ED symptoms may provide insight into how to prevent and treat these disorders. This study is to explore topics on Twitter related to EDs. We applied the Correlation Explanation (CorEx) topic model on 18,288 ED-related tweets and identified 20 topics, which were further grouped into 8 categories. The top two topic categories are body image and ED consequences. We manually evaluated the relevance of tweets to their assigned topics and average accuracy is 77.86%. Our findings are consistent with another study using content analysis, and we identified additional topics, such as ED consequences, pornography, and treatment and education from these tweets.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2019 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ICHI 2019
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781538691380
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2019
Event7th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ICHI 2019 - Xi'an, China
Duration: Jun 10 2019Jun 13 2019

Publication series

Name2019 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ICHI 2019

Conference

Conference7th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ICHI 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityXi'an
Period6/10/196/13/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Body image
  • Eating disorder
  • Social media
  • Topic model
  • Twitter

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