In the current study, we apply multi-class and multi-label sentence classification to sentiment analysis of online medical forums. We aim to identify major health issues discussed in online social media and the types of sentiments those issues evoke. We use ontology of personal health information for Information Extraction and apply Machine Learning methods in automated recognition of the expressed sentiments.

Manual text annotation is an essential part of Big Text analytics. Although annotators work with limited parts of data sets, their results are extrapolated by automated text classification and affect the final classification results. Reliability of annotations and adequacy of assigned labels are especially important in the case of sentiment annotations. In the current study we examine inter-annotator agreement in multi-class, multi-label sentiment annotation of messages. We used several annotation agreement measures, as well as statistical analysis and Machine Learning to assess the resulting annotations.