A Prior Knowledge Based Neural Attention Model for Opioid Topic Identification

Abstract

The opioid epidemic has become a serious public health crisis in the United States. Social media sources such as Reddit containing user-generated content may be a valuable safety surveillance platform to evaluate discussions discerning opioid use. This paper proposes a prior knowledge based neural attention model for opioid topics identification, which considers prior knowledge with attention mechanism. Experimental results on a real-world dataset show that our model can extract coherent topics, the identified less discussed but important topics provide more comprehensive information for opioid safety surveillance.