In this paper, we describe a system for automatic construction of user disease progression timelines from their posts in online support groups using minimal supervision. In recent years, several online support groups have been established which has led to a huge increase in the amount of patient-authored text available. Creating systems which can automatically extract important medical events and create disease progression timelines for users from such text can help in patient health monitoring as well as studying links between medical events and users’ participation in support groups. Prior work in this domain has used manually constructed keyword sets to detect medical events. In this work, our aim is to perform medical event detection using minimal supervision in order to develop a more general timeline construction system. Our system achieves an accuracy of 55.17%, which is 92% of the performance achieved by a supervised baseline system.

There has been a long standing interest in understanding ‘Social Influence’ both in Social Sciences and in Computational Linguistics. In this paper, we present a novel approach to study and measure interpersonal influence in daily interactions. Motivated by the basic principles of influence, we attempt to identify indicative linguistic features of the posts in an online knitting community. We present the scheme used to operationalize and label the posts as influential or non-influential. Experiments with the identified features show an improvement in the classification accuracy of influence by 3.15%. Our results illustrate the important correlation between the structure of the language and its potential to influence others.