Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a research field where a language in consideration is processed to understand its syntactic, semantic, and sentimental aspects. The advancement in the NLP area has helped solve problems in the domains such as Neural Machine Translation, Name Entity Recognition, Sentiment Analysis, and Chatbots, to name a few. The topic of NLP broadly consists of two main parts: the representation of the input text (raw data) into numerical format (vectors or matrix) and the design of models for processing the numerical data. This paper focuses on the former part and surveys how the NLP field has evolved from rule-based, statistical to more context-sensitive learned representations. For each embedding type, we list their representation, issues they addressed, limitations, and applications. This survey covers the history of text representations from the 1970s and onwards, from regular expressions to the latest vector representations used to encode the raw text data. It demonstrates how the NLP field progressed from where it could comprehend just bits and pieces to all the significant aspects of the text over time.
Social media allows for the creation of communities of interest around a wide variety of medical conditions; one example of which is pain management. Pain management is a critical portion of the overall healthcare system, as evidenced by the pervasive opioid crisis in the United States. One population that struggles with pain management is communities that experience genetic disorders. The goal of this paper is to examine the findings of the extant academic literature regarding pain management for genetic disorders on social media and compare it with the actual posting of people on social media in regard to their chronic pain and pain management. The authors used text mining techniques of the Brandwatch application to analyze the users' posts on different social media platforms such as online discussion forum, blog, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, etc. The analysis demonstrates differences in the focus of scholarly inquiry regarding social media with user practice in relation to the topic of pain management.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.