Multi-View Unsupervised User Feature Embedding for Social Media-based Substance Use Prediction

Tao Ding, Warren K. Bickel, Shimei Pan


Abstract
In this paper, we demonstrate how the state-of-the-art machine learning and text mining techniques can be used to build effective social media-based substance use detection systems. Since a substance use ground truth is difficult to obtain on a large scale, to maximize system performance, we explore different unsupervised feature learning methods to take advantage of a large amount of unsupervised social media data. We also demonstrate the benefit of using multi-view unsupervised feature learning to combine heterogeneous user information such as Facebook “likes” and “status updates” to enhance system performance. Based on our evaluation, our best models achieved 86% AUC for predicting tobacco use, 81% for alcohol use and 84% for illicit drug use, all of which significantly outperformed existing methods. Our investigation has also uncovered interesting relations between a user’s social media behavior (e.g., word usage) and substance use.
Anthology ID:
D17-1241
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2275–2284
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1241
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1241
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tao Ding, Warren K. Bickel, and Shimei Pan. 2017. Multi-View Unsupervised User Feature Embedding for Social Media-based Substance Use Prediction. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2275–2284, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-View Unsupervised User Feature Embedding for Social Media-based Substance Use Prediction (Ding et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1241.pdf