Abstract
Despite the high consumption of dietary supplements (DS), few reliable, relevant, and comprehensive online resources could satisfy information seekers. This research study aims to understand consumer information needs on DS using topic modeling, and to evaluate accuracy in correctly identifying topics from social media. We retrieved 16,095 unique questions posted on Yahoo! Answers relating to 438 unique DS ingredients mentioned in sub-section, “Alternative medicine” under the section, “Health”. We implemented an unsupervised topic modeling method, Correlation Explanation (CorEx) to unveil the various topics in which consumers are most interested. We manually reviewed the keywords of all the 200 topics generated by CorEx and assigned them to 38 health-related categories, corresponding to 12 higher-level groups. We found high accuracy (90-100%) in identifying questions that correctly align with the selected topics. The results could guide us to generate a more comprehensive and structured DS resource based on consumers' information needs.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Title of host publication | MEDINFO 2019 |
Subtitle of host publication | Health and Wellbeing e-Networks for All - Proceedings of the 17th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics |
Editors | Brigitte Seroussi, Lucila Ohno-Machado, Lucila Ohno-Machado, Brigitte Seroussi |
Publisher | IOS Press |
Pages | 323-327 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Volume | 264 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781643680026 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 21 2019 |
Event | 17th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics, MEDINFO 2019 - Lyon, France Duration: Aug 25 2019 → Aug 30 2019 |
Publication series
Name | Studies in health technology and informatics |
---|---|
ISSN (Print) | 0926-9630 |
Conference
Conference | 17th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics, MEDINFO 2019 |
---|---|
Country/Territory | France |
City | Lyon |
Period | 8/25/19 → 8/30/19 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by the U.S. National Institutes for Health (R01AT009457) (Zhang).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Keywords
- Dietary supplements
- Social media
- Topic modeling
- Social Media
- Dietary Supplements
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article