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Discriminative cues for different stages of smoking cessation in online community

conference contribution
posted on 2016-01-01, 00:00 authored by Thin NguyenThin Nguyen, R Borland, John YearwoodJohn Yearwood, Hua YongHua Yong, Svetha VenkateshSvetha Venkatesh, Quoc-Dinh Phung
Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable death, being responsible for about six million deaths annually worldwide. Most smokers want to quit, but many find quitting difficult. The Internet enables people interested in quitting smoking to connect with others via online communities; however, the characteristics of these discussions are not well understood. This work aims to explore the textual cues of an online community interested in quitting smoking: www.reddit.com/r/ stopsmoking – “a place for redditors to motivate each other to quit smoking”. A total of approximately 5, 000 posts were randomly selected from the community. Four subgroups of posts based on the cessation days of abstainers were defined: S0: within the first week, S1: within the first month (excluding cohort S0), S2: from second month to one year, and S3: beyond one year. Psycho-linguistic features and content topics were extracted from the posts and analysed. Machine learning techniques were used to discriminate the online conversations in the first week S0 from the other subgroups. Topics and psycho-linguistic features were found to be highly valid predictors of the subgroups, possibly providing an important step in understanding social media and its use in studies of smoking and other addictions in online settings.

History

Event

Fudan University. Conference (17th : 2016 : Shanghai, China)

Volume

LNCS 10042

Series

Fudan University Conference

Pagination

146 - 153

Publisher

Springer International

Location

Shanghai, China

Place of publication

Cham, Switzerland

Start date

2016-11-07

End date

2016-11-10

ISSN

0302-9743

eISSN

1611-3349

ISBN-13

9783319487427

Language

eng

Publication classification

E Conference publication; E1 Full written paper - refereed

Copyright notice

2016, Springer International Publishing AG

Editor/Contributor(s)

W Cellary, M Mokbel, J Wang, H Wang, R Zhou, Y Zhang

Title of proceedings

WISE 2016 : Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering