Theme-driven Keyphrase Extraction from Social Media on Opioid Recovery

An emerging trend on social media platforms is their use as safe spaces for peer support. Particularly in healthcare, where many medical conditions contain harsh stigmas, social media has become a stigma-free way to engage in dialogues regarding symptoms, treatments, and personal experiences. Many existing works have employed NLP algorithms to facilitate quantitative analysis of health trends. Notably absent from existing works are keyphrase extraction (KE) models for social health posts-a task crucial to discovering emerging public health trends. This paper presents a novel, theme-driven KE dataset, SuboxoPhrase, and a qualitative annotation scheme with an overarching goal of extracting targeted clinically-relevant keyphrases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to design a KE schema for social media healthcare texts. To demonstrate the value of this approach, this study analyzes Reddit posts regarding medications for opioid use disorder, a paramount health concern worldwide. Additionally, we benchmark ten off-the-shelf KE models on our new dataset, demonstrating the unique extraction challenges in modeling user-generated health texts. The proposed theme-driven KE approach lays the foundation of future work on efficient, large-scale analysis of social health texts, allowing researchers to surface useful public health trends, patterns, and knowledge gaps.