Understanding information needs during COVID-19: A comparison study between an online health community and a Q&A platform.

ABSTRACT: This paper aims at identifying user's information needs on Coronavirus and the differences of user's information needs between the online health community MedHelp and the question-and-answer forum Quora during the COVID-19 global pandemic. We obtained the posts in the sub-community Coronavirus on MedHelp (195 posts with 1627 answers) and under the topic of COVID-19(2019-2020) on Quora (263 posts with 8401 answers) via web scraping built on Selenium WebDriver. After preprocessing, we conducted topic modeling on both corpora and identified the best topic model for each corpus based on the diagnostic metrics. Leveraging the improved sqrt-cosine similarity measurement, we further compared the topic similarity between these two corpora. This study finds that there are common infor

SUBMITTER: Peng RX 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9720062 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature