Can I Hear You? Sentiment Analysis on Medical Forums

Text mining studies have started to investigae relations between positive and negative opinions and patients’ physical health. Several studies linked the personal lexicon with health and the health-related behavior of the individual. However, few text mining studies were performed to analyze opinions expressed in a large volume of user-written Web content. Our current study focused on performing sentiment analysis on several medical forums dedicated to Hearing Loss (HL). We categorized messages posted on the forums as positive, negative and neutral. Our study had two stages: first, we applied manual annotation of the posts with two annotators and have 82.01% overall agreement with kappa 0.65 and then we applied Machine Learning techniques to classify the posts.