Mining Themes and Interests in the Asperger’s and Autism Community

Abstract

Discussion forums offer a new source of insight for the experiences and challenges faced by individuals affected by mental disorders. Language technology can help domain experts gather insight from these forums, by aggregating themes and user behaviors across thousands of conversa-tions. We present a novel model for web forums, which captures both thematic con-tent as well as user-specific interests. Ap-plying this model to the Aspies Central fo-rum (which covers issues related to As-perger’s syndrome and autism spectrum disorder), we identify several topics of concern to individuals who report being on the autism spectrum. We perform the eval-uation on the data collected from Aspies Central forum, including 1,939 threads, 29,947 posts and 972 users. Quantita-tive evaluations demonstrate that the top-ics extracted by this model are substan-tially more than those obtained by Latent Dirichlet Allocation and the Author-Topic Model. Qualitative analysis by subject-matter experts suggests intriguing direc-tions for future investigation.