Monitoring Public Perception of Medical Products by Automatically Assigning Metadata to Online Discussion Group Postings

This paper describes an ongoing project whose goal is to create a digital library of public perceptions of over-the-counter and prescription drugs. The Web has created an unprecedented opportunity to mine and organize public perceptions and experiences with medications. There are hundreds of chat rooms devoted to medical conditions and discussion groups for medicines and their side effects. Gathering information and discerning patterns by trawling through the web manually is an arduous and time-consuming project, both inefficient and incomplete. The system described in this paper automatically collects data from chat rooms and discussion groups; meta-tags the information and organizes the resulting meta-tags into a meaningful format. The technology is expected to enable manufacturers, medical researchers, regulators, and the public to access and interpret the data.