Using Named Entity Recognition to Identify Substances Used in the Self-medication of Opioid Withdrawal: Natural Language Processing Study of Reddit Data.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The cessation of opioid use can cause withdrawal symptoms. People often continue opioid misuse to avoid these symptoms. Many people who use opioids self-treat withdrawal symptoms with a range of substances. Little is known about the substances that people use or their effects.

Objective

The aim of this study is to validate a methodology for identifying the substances used to treat symptoms of opioid withdrawal by a community of people who use opioids on the social media site Reddit.

Methods

We developed a named entity recognition model to extract substances and effects from nearly 4 million comments from the r/opiates and r/OpiatesRecovery subreddits. To identify effects that are symptoms of opioid withdrawal and substances that are potential remedies for t

SUBMITTER: Preiss A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9008522 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature