Identifying Patterns in Administrative Tasks through Structural Topic Modeling: A Study of Task Definitions, Prevalence, and Shifts in a Mental Health Practice's Operations during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Fatigue, Pain, and Medication: Mining Online Posts Regarding Rheumatoid Arthritis From Reddit

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a chronic and systemic autoimmune disease that primarily attacks the joints around the body, is affecting a large number of people worldwide through severe symptoms and complications. Therefore, it is crucial to understand these patients' problems and support needs such that effective strategies or solutions can be made to improve their long-term treatment experience. In this paper, we present an in-depth study that is based on the structural topic model to uncover the themes and concerns in online RA posts from Reddit, an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. In addition, we compared the topic prevalence differences before and after the COVID-19 pandemic to understand the impact of the pandemic on these online users. This study demonstrates the potential of using text-mining techniques on social media data to learn the treatment experiments of RA patients.

Year 2021: COVID-19, Information Extraction and BERTization among the Hottest Topics in Medical Natural Language Processing

OBJECTIVES

Analyze the content of publications within the medical natural language processing (NLP) domain in 2021.

METHODS

Automatic and manual preselection of publications to be reviewed, and selection of the best NLP papers of the year. Analysis of the important issues.

RESULTS

Four best papers have been selected in 2021. We also propose an analysis of the content of the NLP publications in 2021, all topics included.

CONCLUSIONS

The main issues addressed in 2021 are related to the investigation of COVID-related questions and to the further adaptation and use of transformer models. Besides, the trends from the past years continue, such as information extraction and use of information from social networks.