Title: Characterizing Salient Concepts in Online Health Communities Abstract: More and more, patients rely on online health communities (e.g., discussion forums, but also blogs and mailing lists) to exchange information, practical tips, and stories about their conditions as well as to get emotional support from their peers. While this type of social networking has become central to the daily lives and decision-making processes of many patients, there is a large set of open questions reaching several areas of research, including technology, clinical research, public health research, and ethics to name a few. In this talk, I will present some of the most pertinent research questions and argue that large-scale analytics methods can help answer some of them. In particular, I will focus on the task of discovering concepts discussed in online health communities and how this can be useful for further analysis.
