Online Autism Communities
I am often surprised what counts as academic research these days, but I stumbled upon one such paper that I thought might be of general interest. It is a study from 2017 of the 550,000 comments left on two popular forums, autismweb.com and autism-pdd.net . Both of these forums have since closed down. Cataloguing Treatments Discussed and Used in Online Autism Communities A large number of patients discuss treatments in online health communities (OHCs). One research question of interest to health researchers is whether treatments being discussed in OHCs are eventually used by community members in their real lives. In this paper, we rely on machine learning methods to automatically identify attributions of mentions of treatments from an online autism community. The context of our work is online autism communities, where parents exchange support for the care of their children with autism spectrum disorder. Our methods are able to distinguish discussions of treatments that are associated wi...