The Use of Natural Language Processing Methods in Reddit to Investigate Opioid Use: Scoping Review

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The growing availability of big data spontaneously generated by social media platforms allows us to leverage natural language processing (NLP) methods as valuable tools to understand the opioid crisis. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to understand how NLP has been applied to Reddit (Reddit Inc) data to study opioid use. METHODS: We systematically searched for peer-reviewed studies and conference abstracts in PubMed, Scopus, PsycINFO, ACL Anthology, IEEE Xplore, and Association for Computing Machinery data repositories up to July 19, 2022. Inclusion criteria were studies investigating opioid use, using NLP techniques to analyze the textual corpora, and using Reddit as the social media data so..