Natural Language Processing for Health and Social Media Authors:

Intro Social media, such as Twitter, has shown great potential to analyze real world events, such as politics, product sentiment and natural disasters. In recent years, social media has emerged in the health community, particularly in public health, as a revolutionary data source for a wide range of problems. Vast amounts of naturalistic population data can be collected through social media much faster and at lower cost than through traditional data sources such as surveys. Additionally, social media provides novel data previously unavailable to researchers. These advantages allow for the rapid formulation and evaluation of novel hypotheses, aiding decisions about how best to spend limited traditional data collection resources.