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Post Classification and Recommendation for an Online Smoking Cessation Community

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Public Health Intelligence and the Internet

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

Abstract

There are an increasing number of health-related communities and forums developed on the Internet, where people discuss certain health issues and exchange social support with each other. However, due to the huge amount and loose structure of user-generated content in the health communities, it is difficult for users to find relevant topics or peers to discuss with. In this paper, we focus on an online smoking cessation forum, QuitStop. We extract user discussion content from the forum, apply machine learning technology to classify posts in the forum, and develop recommendation techniques to help users find valuable topics. Using text and health feature sets, the classifiers are developed and optimized to categorize posts in terms of user intentions and social support types. The recommender systems are then developed to make a recommendation of posts to users, in which the classification results are incorporated in the neighbor-based collaborative filtering approach. It is found that the combination of text and health feature sets can achieve satisfactory classification result. Integrating classification result could help relieving cold start problem in the recommendation. It can greatly improve the recall of recommendation when limited knowledge is known for a thread.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Mi Zhang & Christopher C. Yang

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  1. Mi Zhang
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  2. Christopher C. Yang
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Correspondence to Mi Zhang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pediatrics, Center for Biomedical Informatics, The University of Tennessee Health Science Center—Oak-Ridge National Laboratory (UTHSC-ORNL), Memphis, Tennessee, USA

    Arash Shaban-Nejad

  2. Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    John S. Brownstein

  3. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Occupational Health, McGill Clinical & Health Informatics, McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    David L. Buckeridge

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Zhang, M., Yang, C.C. (2017). Post Classification and Recommendation for an Online Smoking Cessation Community. In: Shaban-Nejad, A., Brownstein, J., Buckeridge, D. (eds) Public Health Intelligence and the Internet. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68604-2_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68604-2_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-68602-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-68604-2

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