Skyler Zou


2023

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Can Social Media Inform Dietary Approaches for Health Management? A Dataset and Benchmark for Low-Carb Diet
Skyler Zou | Xiang Dai | Grant Brinkworth | Pennie Taylor | Sarvnaz Karimi
The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks

Social media offers an accessible avenue for individuals of diverse backgrounds and circumstances to share their unique perspectives and experiences. Our study focuses on the experience of low carbohydrate diets, motivated by recent research and clinical trials that elucidates the diet’s promising health benefits. Given the lack of any suitable annotated dataset in this domain, we first define an annotation schema that reflects the interests of healthcare professionals and then manually annotate data from the Reddit social network. Finally, we benchmark the effectiveness of several classification approaches that are based on statistical Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier, pre-train-then-finetune RoBERTa classifier, and, off-the-shelf ChatGPT API, on our annotated dataset. Our annotations and scripts that are used to download the Reddit posts are publicly available at https://data.csiro.au/collection/csiro:59208.