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Exploring Health Topics in Chinese Social Media: An Analysis of Sina Weibo
Last modified: 2014-06-18
Abstract
This paper seeks to identify and characterize health-related topics discussed on the Chinese microblogging website, Sina Weibo. We identified nearly 1 million messages containing health-related keywords, filtered from a dataset of 93 million messages spanning five years. We applied probabilistic topic models to this dataset and identified the prominent health topics. We show that a variety of health topics are discussed in Sina Weibo, and that four flu-related topics are correlated with monthly influenza case rates in China.
Keywords
topic modeling, social media, public health
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