Determining the prevalence of cannabis, tobacco, and vaping device mentions in online communities using natural language processing

Hu, Mengke; Benson, Ryzen; Chen, Annie; Zhu, Shu‐Hong; Conway, Mike

doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2021.109016

Cited by 9 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…For example, Wang et al [18] classified popular e-cigarette flavors in Reddit discussions. In addition, Hu et al [60] summarized use patterns of cigarettes and vaping by analyzing discussions from 8 subreddit groups. Other studies have also aimed to identify Reddit users' behavioral patterns, such as subjective experiences of microdosing [52,53] and self-help practices [36].…”

Section: Study Objectives (Rq1)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Studies, n (%) Description Reasons mentioned [19][20][21]23,25,[28][29][30][31]33,35,[37][38][39]42,45,49,[52][53][54][55][56]60,65,72,73] 26 (43) The anonymous nature of Reddit enables a more candid and open discussion of stigmatized topics.…”

Section: Referencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anonymous data [18,19,[21][22][23][26][27][28][29][30][31]33,34,38,45,55,57,60,61,65,[72][73][74][75] 24 (40) Reddit is one of the most popular social networking sites.…”

Section: Referencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Open and free platform [19][20][21][22][23]25,28,30,44,46,48,55,57,59,60,63,66,70,71,73] 20 (33) Discussions are organized into topics of interest (ie, subreddits), allowing researchers to identify people and topics of interest.…”

Section: Referencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Investigating Substance Use via Reddit: Systematic Scoping Review

Chi,

Chen

2023

J Med Internet Res

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Background Reddit’s (Reddit Inc) large user base, diverse communities, and anonymity make it a useful platform for substance use research. Despite a growing body of literature on substance use on Reddit, challenges and limitations must be carefully considered. However, no systematic scoping review has been conducted on the use of Reddit as a data source for substance use research. Objective This review aims to investigate the use of Reddit for studying substance use by examining previous studies’ objectives, reasons, limitations, and methods for using Reddit. In addition, we discuss the implications and contributions of previous studies and identify gaps in the literature that require further attention. Methods A total of 7 databases were searched using keyword combinations including Reddit and substance-related keywords in April 2022. The initial search resulted in 456 articles, and 227 articles remained after removing duplicates. All included studies were peer reviewed, empirical, available in full text, and pertinent to Reddit and substance use, and they were all written in English. After screening, 60 articles met the eligibility criteria for the review, with 57 articles identified from the initial database search and 3 from the ancestry search. A codebook was developed, and qualitative content analysis was performed to extract relevant evidence related to the research questions. Results The use of Reddit for studying substance use has grown steadily since 2015, with a sharp increase in 2021. The primary objective was to identify tendencies and patterns in various types of substance use discussions (52/60, 87%). Reddit was also used to explore unique user experiences, propose methodologies, investigate user interactions, and develop interventions. A total of 9 reasons for using Reddit to study substance use were identified, such as the platform’s anonymity, its widespread popularity, and the explicit topics of subreddits. However, 7 limitations were noted, including the platform’s low representativeness of the general population with substance use and the lack of demographic information. Most studies use application programming interfaces for data collection and quantitative approaches for analysis, with few using qualitative approaches. Machine learning algorithms are commonly used for natural language processing tasks. The theoretical, methodological, and practical implications and contributions of the included articles are summarized and discussed. The most prevalent practical implications are investigating prevailing topics in Reddit discussions, providing recommendations for clinical practices and policies, and comparing Reddit discussions on substance use across various sources. Conclusions This systematic scoping review provides an overview of Reddit’s use as a data source for substance use research. Although the limitations of Reddit data must be considered, analyzing them can be useful for understanding patterns and user experiences related to substance use. Our review also highlights gaps in the literature and suggests avenues for future research.

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Section: Study Objectives (Rq1)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Referencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anonymous data [18,19,[21][22][23][26][27][28][29][30][31]33,34,38,45,55,57,60,61,65,[72][73][74][75] 24 (40) Reddit is one of the most popular social networking sites.…”

Section: Referencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Referencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Investigating Substance Use via Reddit: Systematic Scoping Review

Chi,

Chen

2023

J Med Internet Res

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“…Reddit has been used to study the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on opioid use patterns and disruptions to treatment ( 33 , 34 ), emerging forms of cannabis discussed in subreddits ( 35 ), potential adverse health effects associated with specific JUUL pod flavors ( 36 ), and to study linguistic patterns characteristic of alcohol and tobacco abstinence ( 37 ), to name a few. Further, we recently published results of natural language processing (NLP) pipelines developed to identify the prevalence of tobacco, cannabis, and ENDS mentions within tobacco, cannabis, and ENDS-related subreddits ( 38 ). However, that prior study was primarily concerned with the computational identification of tobacco, cannabis and ENDS mentions in Reddit posts, hence we did not further analyze these posts for the topics discussed within.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining Cannabis, Tobacco, and Vaping Discourse on Reddit: An Exploratory Approach Using Natural Language Processing

Benson

Chen

et al. 2022

Front. Public Health

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Background: Perceptions of tobacco, cannabis, and electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) are continually evolving in the United States. Exploring these characteristics through user generated text sources may provide novel insights into product use behavior that are challenging to identify using survey-based methods. The objective of this study was to compare the topics frequently discussed among Reddit members in cannabis, tobacco, and ENDS-specific subreddits.Methods: We collected 643,070 posts on the social media site Reddit between January 2013 and December 2018. We developed and validated an annotation scheme, achieving a high level of agreement among annotators. We then manually coded a subset of 2,630 posts for their content with relation to experiences and use of the three products of interest, and further developed word cloud representations of the words contained in these posts. Finally, we applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to the 643,070 posts to identify emerging themes related to cannabis, tobacco, and ENDS products being discussed on Reddit.Results: Our manual annotation process yielded 2,148 (81.6%) posts that contained a mention(s) of either cannabis, tobacco, or ENDS with 1,537 (71.5%) of these posts mentioning cannabis, 421 (19.5%) mentioning ENDS, and 264 (12.2%) mentioning tobacco. In cannabis-specific subreddits, personal experiences with cannabis, cannabis legislation, health effects of cannabis use, methods and forms of cannabis, and the cultivation of cannabis were commonly discussed topics. The discussion in tobacco-specific subreddits often focused on the discussion of brands and types of combustible tobacco, as well as smoking cessation experiences and advice. In ENDS-specific subreddits, topics often included ENDS accessories and parts, flavors and nicotine solutions, procurement of ENDS, and the use of ENDS for smoking cessation.Conclusion: Our findings highlight the posting and participation patterns of Reddit members in cannabis, tobacco, and ENDS-specific subreddits and provide novel insights into aspects of personal use regarding these products. These findings complement epidemiologic study designs and highlight the potential of using specific subreddits to explore personal experiences with cannabis, ENDS, and tobacco products.

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Implementation of Financial Audited Robot Question and Answer Technology of Feature Processing and Improved Bi-LSTM

Liu

Zhao

2022

Scientific Programming

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In order to improve the accuracy of financial robot audit question answering, we propose, on the premise of processing corpus features, combining Bi-LSTM network and CRF to identify the domain entities, so as to solve the problem of low recognition rate of financial knowledge domain entities, and introducing the mechanism based on attention and CNN network to construct the multigranularity feature question-answering matching model. Finally, the above methods are verified by experiments. The results show that the AUC, MAP, and MRR increase by 0.74%, 0.85%, and 0.81%, respectively, indicating the feasibility of the improved method.

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Determining the prevalence of cannabis, tobacco, and vaping device mentions in online communities using natural language processing

Cited by 9 publications

References 52 publications

Investigating Substance Use via Reddit: Systematic Scoping Review

Investigating Substance Use via Reddit: Systematic Scoping Review

Examining Cannabis, Tobacco, and Vaping Discourse on Reddit: An Exploratory Approach Using Natural Language Processing

Implementation of Financial Audited Robot Question and Answer Technology of Feature Processing and Improved Bi-LSTM

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