Title
Detecting health events on the social web to enable epidemic intelligence
Abstract
Content analysis and clustering of natural language documents becomes crucial in various domains, even in public health. Recent pandemics such as Swine Flu have caused concern for public health officials. Given the ever increasing pace at which infectious diseases can spread globally, officials must be prepared to react sooner and with greater epidemic intelligence gathering capabilities. Information should be gathered from a broader range of sources, including the Web which in turn requires more robust processing capabilities. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose a new approach to detect public health events in an unsupervised manner. We address the problems associated with adapting an unsupervised learner to the medical domain and in doing so, propose an approach which combines aspects from different feature-based event detection methods. We evaluate our approach with a real world dataset with respect to the quality of article clusters. Our results show that we are able to achieve a precision of 62% and a recall of 75% evaluated using manually annotated, real-world data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1007/978-3-642-24583-1_10
SPIRE
Keywords
Field
DocType
unsupervised manner,social web,unsupervised learner,epidemic intelligence,new approach,broader range,public health official,article cluster,public health event,detecting health event,swine flu,content analysis,public health,clustering
Public health,Data science,Content analysis,Pace,World Wide Web,Information retrieval,Social web,Computer science,Natural language,Pandemic,Cluster analysis,Recall
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
7024
0302-9743
8
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.51
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marco Fisichella18012.38
Avaré Stewart211110.56
Alfredo Cuzzocrea31751200.90
Kerstin Denecke414023.57