Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
5.41 INTERNET, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND ONLINE GAMING IN ADOLESCENT MENTAL HEALTH PATIENTS: TOWARDS A NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (NLP) APPROACH
Section snippets
Objectives
The goals of this session are as follows: 1) to automate the identification of the mentions of internet use, social media, and online gaming in electronic health records (EHRs) of a cohort of UK-based adolescents in contact with mental health services by developing a preprocessing neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) step; and 2) to classify mentions as detrimental, supportive, or neutral.
Methods
A corpus of 5480 documents, extracted from the EHRs of 200 patients (2009–2016), was identified using the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS). The corpus was searched using a gazetteer of internet/social media/online gaming terms. The dictionary was curated through an iterative process of test data collection and refinement of search terms and language-based rules. Two researchers independently annotated a sample document, achieving inter-rater agreement of kappa = 0.68. A total of 200
Results
The final corpus of 101 documents (64 patients) contained 128 mentions of internet/social media/online gaming. The mean age was 14 years (age range 11–17 years), 37 were males, and 27 were females, with ethnic groups similar to the local population. Internet mentions were 33 percent detrimental, 48 percent supportive, and 19 percent neutral. Social media mentions were predominantly female and classified as detrimental (50%), with little supportive benefits (9%). Online gaming was predominant
Conclusions
The development of this preprocessing step and manual curation of a real-world dataset allow us to develop an NLP tool to identify and distinguish internet/social media/online gaming in EHRs. This will allow further research on large datasets to investigate potential associations with adolescent mental health outcomes to inform risk assessment and develop future interventions. It is of particular relevance, because clinical guidelines increasingly are suggesting that young people should be