title: Breast cancer and quality of life: medical information extraction from health forums.
abstract: Internet health forums are a rich textual resource with content generated through free exchanges among patients and, in certain cases, health professionals. We tackle the problem of retrieving clinically relevant information from such forums, with relevant topics being defined from clinical auto-questionnaires. Texts in forums are largely unstructured and noisy, calling for adapted preprocessing and query methods. We minimize the number of false negatives in queries by using a synonym tool to achieve query expansion of initial topic keywords. To avoid false positives, we propose a new measure based on a statistical comparison of frequent co-occurrences in a large reference corpus (Web) to keep only relevant expansions. Our work is motivated by a study of breast cancer patients' health-related quality of life (QoL). We consider topics defined from a breast-cancer specific QoL-questionnaire. We quantify and structure occurrences in posts of a specialized French forum and outline important future developments.
authors.affiliation: LIRMM, Université Montpellier, France.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Opitz
authors.affiliation: LIRMM, Université Montpellier, France.
authors.forename: Jérome
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Aze
authors.affiliation: LIRMM, Université Montpellier, France.
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bringay
authors.affiliation: I3M, Université Montpellier, France.
authors.forename: Cyrille
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Joutard
authors.affiliation: I3M, Université Montpellier, France.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lavergne
authors.affiliation: Biostatistics Unit, Institut de Cancérologie de Montpellier, France.
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mollevi
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D066275:Health Information Exchange / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D011788:Quality of Life / Q000523:psychology*; D061108:Social Media / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled