Natural Language Processing Tools Struggle to Read Social Media

Social media may offer an untapped data resource for healthcare, but natural language processing (NLP) tools still struggle to analyze and extract meaningful insights from this information due to lack of context and ambiguous expressions, according to a study published in JAMIA. Approximately 70 percent of the US population actively uses social media, the researchers noted, and 37 percent of those users have identified health and medicine as the most interesting topic of discussion on social sites. As a result, investigators are increasingly using social media as a data source for monitoring health trends and opinions.