Discovering opioid slang on social media: A Word2Vec approach with reddit data.

ABSTRACT: The CDC reported that the overdose of prescription or illicit opioids was responsible for the deaths of over 80,000 Americans in 2021. Social media is a valuable source of insight into problematic patterns of substance misuse. The way people converse with illicit drugs in online forums is highly variable, and slang terms are frequently used. Manually identifying names of specific drugs can be difficult in both time and labor.

Subjects and methods

The study utilized the Gensim Python library and its Word2Vec neural network model to develop an auto-encoding neural network, enabling the innovative analysis of drug-related discourse downloaded from the Reddit website. The slang terms were then used to qualitatively analyze the topics and categories of drugs discussed on the forum.

Re

SUBMITTER: Holbrook E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11626628 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature