GDWDS: First Insights from a Student-based Key Phrase Annotation Process of Medical Information Needs on a Novel German Diabetes Web Data Set Julia Romberg Institute of Computer Science Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf D-40225 Düsseldorf, Germany romberg@cs.uni-duesseldorf.de ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION The information needs of individuals are at the forefront of Nowadays social media has taken an important place in various issues. One platform that users use to address their most people’s lives. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook needs is Internet forums. Medical forums in particular are and Instagram are widely used to communicate feelings and very much shaped by questions and articulated needs. opinions. Besides the just mentioned prominent examples As part of our research, the need for information is to exists a variety of other mediums which serve as speaking be examined specifically in the context of diabetes expres- tube. Especially blogs and forums are used to inform about sed in web forums. For this purpose we introduce GDWDS, specific themes and to discuss them. a novel German diabetes web data set. Assuming that the One particular aspect that is increasingly picked out as information needs can be understood as key phrases, the a central theme are health-related topics. In [16] Sokolova record was annotated by student annotators. Three tasks et al. have identified multiple reasons for the use of medical were addressed: First the recognition of key phrases in a forums in several studies from the years 1990 to 2009: On document. Second, the annotators were requested to sum- the one hand, persons who are either suffering theirselves marize key phrase of the same content in one group. Third, from a disease or whose beloved ones do, may search for every group should be represented by the most meaningful information that exceeds the information provided by an key phrase contained in this group. attending doctor. Thereby, the information need ranges from The main annotation task of identifying the text units psychological, physical, and social aspects of treatments to that express information needs lead to an average Krippen- alternative treatments. On the other hand, forums offer a dorff’s unitized Alpha of 0.439 which is promising. The tasks point of contact for people that seek for emotional support, of grouping the key phrases and selecting a representative especially from other fellow sufferers. Furthermore, forums could only be evaluated to a limited extent due to their sub- often provide a feeling of anonymity to members, which helps jective dependence on the key phrase detection task. them to communicate more openly about their experiences. A widespread disease is the metabolic disease diabetes Categories and Subject Descriptors mellitus. In 2017, according to the International Diabetes Fe- deration1 , approximately 425 million adults worldwide have H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database Applications: suffered from Diabetes2 , which is more than 5% of the world data mining; I.2.7 [Artificial Intelligence]: Natural Lan- population. guage Processing: language parsing and understanding, text Diabetes appears mainly in two different forms, Type 1 analysis; H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: In- and Type 2. While genetics and environmental factors are formation Search and Retrieval mostly held responsible for Type 1, Type 2 is additionally associated with lifestyle factors. Diabetes is a disease which Keywords often accompanies the affected persons their entire lives. In order to facilitate that these persons can live a normal life Information Retrieval, Information Needs, Keyphrase Ex- nevertheless, a good insulin adjustment and an appropriate traction routine in exercise and nutrition may be needed. Instituti- ons, for example the Deutsches Diabetes-Zentrum 3 (German Diabetes-Center), aim to improve patients’ quality of life, among other things, by focusing on the patient’s information needs and preferences. Patient statistics on these points are collected using questionnaires. This course of action unfortu- nately shows some weaknesses: (i) The number of questions is limited. (ii) Only a limited number of people can take part in a survey. (iii) The evaluation is time-consuming and diffi- 1 http://www.idf.org/ 30th GI-Workshop on Foundations of Databases (Grundlagen von Daten- 2 banken), 22.05.2018 - 25.05.2018, Wuppertal, Germany. www.diabetesatlas.org 3 Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). http://ddz.uni-duesseldorf.de/en/ cult, especially when having free-text fields, which currently forum messages from adolescents with Type 1 diabetes. In require a (manual) qualitative analysis. (iv) The physicians doing this, a corpus consisting of 340 posts was annotated and researchers developing the questionnaires usually have with respect to age, gender, date and duration of illness. another point of view on the diseases and how the treat- They found that diabetes affected persons visit online fo- ments affect the patients. Finally, the researchers who deve- rums mainly for the sake of social support, information and lop the questionnaires usually have a different perspective on advice along with shared experiences. These findings sup- a disease and on how a treatment affects the patients than port our motivation of investigating the information needs those affected. Therefore, patient-relevant questions could in diabetes online forums. Although the corpus is interesting, be omitted. the annotations unfortunately lack reference to information An alternative approach for the analysis of information needs and key phrases. needs and preferences of diabetes patients is the use of in- A lot of research has been conducted in sentiment analy- formation retrieval techniques. A first intuition would be to sis and opinion mining [16, 15, 2, 6, 1]. The used corpora apply natural language processing techniques to the ques- vary from medical forum data for In Vitro Fertilization and tionaries’ included free-text fields. However, to address all Hearing Loss over drug reviews to Twitter messages and the problems listed above, the whole course of action should message boards. Reader-based as well as author-centric an- be changed: Instead of manually posing questions and ma- notation models were applied. Furthermore, domain speci- nually analyzing them in tedious work, existing resources fic lexicons were developed: In [6] a lexicon was built from can be used, namely medical online forums. At this point, drug reviews. Sokolova et al. [16] introduced HealthAffect, a it is necessary to discuss if and to what extent an online domain-specific affective lexicon. Both papers conclude that forum community can represent the general population of general sentiment and affective lexicons cannot adequately diabetic affects. In [7] online social networking for diabetes serve for social media health texts because of the specific is examined. The authors found in the study that online terms and language used in this area. groups on diabetes, using the example of Facebook, cover Further research was conducted on the detection and ex- a broad spectrum of involved persons, such as patients and traction of adverse drug events in social media texts. Karimi their families. Another interesting fact is a special techni- et al. [8] developed CADEC, a annotated corpus of adverse cal affinity of diabetes patients, which is due to the current drug events. Liu et al. [11, 10] investigated on identifying treatment methods such as app-based monitoring of diabe- adverse drug events and implemented an information ex- tes. This suggests that the existing information needs of the traction system for adverse drug events, both on a data set total population are reflected to a large extent in online he- focused on diabetes. These corpora contain information spe- alth media. At the same time, however, it is important to cific to adverse drug events, which at best expresses a subset remember that older patients or patients who have been in of the general need for information. treatment for a very long time are unlikely using these chan- nels. It must also be taken into account that the data corpus 3. THE CORPUS of this work refers to the information needs in industrialized In this section the creation of an appropriate data corpus, countries using the example of Germany. needed for later research, is discussed. To the best of our In this paper, we focus on the annotation process of a data knowledge, there is no existing data corpus consisting of corpus based on forums of this kind. Our long-term research diabetes forum messages that has been annotated in a sense goal is the automated recognition and extraction of infor- we could use for our analysis. mation needs. In order to be able to implement this task Our objective is the recognition and extraction of the in- well-founded, a prior focus on an appropriate corpus anno- formation needs of forum users. The following pattern was tation is necessary as evaluation is an essential point to keep recognized in forum posts. A contribution is opened up in in mind. The remainder of this paper is structured as fol- the multiplicity of cases in order to ask of the community in- lows: First, the data set is introduced. The implementation formation on a certain topic or an answer to a concrete ques- and nature of the annotation and the different steps of the tion. For this purpose, first the more detailed circumstances annotation process are explained. Subsequently, the quali- are explained and then the corresponding questions are for- ty of the resulting data set is calculated and discussed by mulated. Subsequently, other users respond to the post with means of an Inter-Annotator Agreement. We then conclude answers and descriptions of their own experiences. and describe the use of this study for a further annotation The data corpus GDWDS was build on a freely accessible process. German diabetes forum. The data set for this initial stu- dy was build by extracting 150 forum contributions from 2. RELATED WORK the corpus. Assuming that a user announces his information There has been previous research in the field of social needs when creating a thread, only the initial contributions media health and diabetes in the recent years. were retained while the replies were discarded. Often the tit- Multiple publications have focused on content analysis on le of a thread also contains important information. In order medical social media texts. Denecke et al. [4] compared dif- to keep this information, the thread title was added to the ferent social media health data sources by first extracting document as a heading. medical concepts and then pointing out content differences. They also focused on the binary classification problem of 3.1 Annotation Setup informative versus affective statements. In [3] medical sup- We see the problem of recognizing information needs as an port group texts were clustered into topics whereas in [17] information extraction problem. Key words and key phrases clustering was used to analyze user preferences for the use expressing these needs should be extracted to allow a sum- of information sources and to analyze the users’ general pos- mary of the information needs. To form a gold standard for ting behavior. Ravert et al. [14] analyzed the content online the evaluation of such techniques, an annotation of the da- PHASE 1 PHASE 2 PHASE 3 Alternative medicati- on for medicament X? Group 1 Group 1 • Alternative medication for • Alternative medication for Hello everybody, medicament X? medicament X? right now I’m thretened with • Are there any alternative • Are there any alternative medi- medicament X 3x20 mg. medications now? cations now? I have been taking this drug for many years... Group 2 Group 2 Are there any alterna- tive medications now? • right now I’m thretened with • right now I’m thretened medicament X 3x20 mg with medicament X 3x20 mg Any help appreciated! Thank you, Anonymous Figure 1: The three annotation phases (phase 1 - key phrase recognition, phase 2 - key phrase grouping, phase 3 - best key phrase identification) are illustrated by means of an example document. ta set must be made. A text sequence is to be divided into • A key phrase must not exceed a sentence boun- annotation units, which are then assigned to a class. Accor- dary. ding to our task there are two classes: key phrase and no key • A key phrase is intended to contain important phrase. content related to the information need expres- Twenty-five student annotators were divided into five an- sed in the document. This may refer to an explicit notation groups with 4 persons and one group of 5 persons. formulation as a question but also to contextual The GDWDS’s 150 documents were divided among the six information that is important for an accurate de- groups so that each group had to handle a workload of 25 scription of the information need. documents. The annotators were instructed to carry out the annotations independently. The annotations were implemen- • If a key idea is described several times in the do- ted using MDSWriter [12]. This tool, originally developed for cument, all entries must be marked. creating multi-document summarization corpora, was used 3. Finally, the recognized key phrases should be reviewed in a modified form. We only use the first three phases of the and checked for clarity, accuracy and content. tool: recognizing key phrases, grouping key phrases with the same content, and identifying a best key phrase within each The clarification of unknown words in (1.) is of particular group. importance, since the medical context requires many tech- In an introductory phase the annotators were explained nical terms and abbreviations. In addition, there are a few the guidelines to be fulfilled. These guidelines were develo- abbreviations that differ from the conventional vocabulary. ped based on the guidelines of [12]. These terms seem to have evolved within the forum commu- It should be noted that the annotation process presented nity. here is rather unusual. In most cases, in a qualitative an- notation setting with extensive rules, only a subset of the 3.1.2 Phase 2 - Key Phrase Grouping data is processed by several annotators in order to be able Following the identification of the key phrases, the par- to estimate the annotation quality. The remaining corpus is ticipants were asked to group phrases of the same content divided on the individual annotators. In the study presented together. Although the texts to be annotated are on average here, the focus is on testing the admissibility and comple- only 1187 characters long, re-mentions occur, among other teness of the guidelines that have already been developed. things caused by the addition of the thread title. The results contribute to the final annotation of the entire body. 3.1.3 Phase 3 - Best Key Phrase Identification In the final annotation phase, participants should select a 3.1.1 Phase 1 - Key Phrase Recognition representative in each group of key ideas. The representative should contain the largest possible information content. 1. The participants were first requested to read a docu- ment, i.e. a forum contribution, completely before star- The three annotation phases are illustrated in Figure 1. In ting the annotation. Unknown words should be looked phase 1, the annotator sees the document to be unitized. The up or asked in advance to ensure comprehension. selected key phrases are underlined in green. Subsequently the key phrases are requested to be grouped according to 2. Subsequently, the key phrases should be marked. The their content. In this example two key phrases refer to the following guidelines should be followed: need for information in relation to an alternative medication to the current one. Hence, they are summed up. The third • A key phrase should at least consist of a predicate key phrase relates to content information, which clarifies the plus subject or a predicate plus an object. expressed information needs and is equally important. This 8,000 Group 1 6 Group 2 Group 3 5 6,000 Group 4 Annotation Group Document Length Group 5 4 Group 6 4,000 3 2 2,000 1 0 −1 −0.5 0 0.5 1 −0.4 −0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 Uα Uα Figure 2: Box plots depicting the distribution of the Figure 3: Plot showing the relation of Uα and the achieved values (U α) within the individual annotati- document length. on groups. phrase builds a second group of key phrases. Finally in phase To evaluate the annotations more accurately and in more 3 the annotator must decide for a best key phrase inside detail, the Inter-Annotator Agreements are further exami- of each group created in the previous phase. The best key ned at the document level. The quality of the annotation phrase is bold. For group 2 no discussion is needed. The results of the individual documents is illustrated in Figure representative in group 1 is selected based on the request 2. The box plot of each group shows the worst as well as for the largest possible information content as not only the the best U α value achieved for a document assigned to this question for an alternative but also the name of the currently group. The boxes illustrate the quartiles and the median. used medicament is stated. The mean value shown in Table 1 is illustrated with a cross. As can be seen, the agreement within the groups is very 3.2 Inter-Annotator Agreement variable. The box plots reflect again that group 4 performs Following the annotation task itself, the resulting anno- worse than the other groups. However, the values achieved tations need to be evaluated. For this the Inter-Annotator in every group extend over an interval of length 0.8 to 1.2, Agreement of the persons of the same annotation group is which corresponds to approximately half the value range of calculated. Krippendorff’s unitized Alpha. Although the average mean value of agreement of 0.439 appears acceptable across the 3.2.1 Phase 1 - Key Phrase Recognition six groups, the large variability of the data indicates that Since annotation phase 1 is a unitizing task with one ca- annotation quality must be considered with caution. tegory, we use Krippendorff’s unitized alpha U α (introduced Figure 3 illustrates the relation between the document in [9]) as a measure. U α ∈ [−1, 1] describes the correspon- length and the agreement. Unexpectedly, the assumption dence of different annotators’ coding units on the same text that longer documents lead to a worse agreement is not con- document. 1 expresses maximum agreement, 0 shows that no firmed here. Although a slight tendency is visible, both the correlation exists between the units and the classes, and −1 left and right tail of the distribution represent short docu- symbolizes a uniform disagreement. The calculations were ments. Accordingly, the content of the marginal documents carried out with DKPro Agreement [13]. was analyzed. In documents with poor agreement, it was First, for every of the six groups of annotators described noted that the annotators were often in agreement on im- in Section 3.1 the groups’ agreement over all 25 documents portant information. However, the distribution of this infor- was considered. Table 1 shows the agreement within the mation into the different key phrases was solved very dif- annotation groups. Annotation group 2 and 3 obtain the ferently. Especially in terms of conjunctions like and, or, ” best agreement having an U α above 0.5. Group 1, 5 and 6 ... “ the annotators were divided. Some annotators split into agree with a value greater than 0.4. Group 4, however, per- more granular units than the others. The importance of con- forms significantly worse achieving only an U α of 0.210. One text information was also assessed differently. For example, possible explanation might be the text length of the docu- in one document a patient described a need for information ments. The average length of a text document in group 4 against the background of his type 1 illness. He also stated was 1645.36 characters. The other groups had on average since when he was affected by the disease. Here, the annota- shorter texts with at least 400 characters less. The longer a tors were divided over whether the temporal context is im- text is, the more descriptive the information requirement is portant for the formulation of the information need. At this described. Likewise, increasingly diverting content may oc- juncture, it should be remembered that the students had no cur. This makes unitizing key phrases harder. Nevertheless, domain knowledge in the field of medicine or diabetes, ma- the remaining groups achieve encouraging Inter-Annotator king it difficult to make a reasoned decision. Furthermore, Agreements. annotation errors were observed. In some annotations, the Annotation Group 1 2 3 4 5 6 Uα 0.409 0.505 0.523 0.210 0.443 0.429 Table 1: Showing the Inter-Annotator Agreement by group according to U α. content doubling of a key phrase has not been re-marked. on part we focused on the Inter-Annotator Agreement. The Individual annotators tended to classify the key phrases so results for phase 1 are promising. Although there is an ob- finely that the selected key phrases individually could not vious variance in the data, for almost half of the documents express a key content of the text. the annotators agreed with at least 0.5, annotation group 4 excluded. We observed different types of problems. The lack 3.2.2 Phrase 2 - Key Phrase Grouping and Phase 3 of subject-specific knowledge was one of the main problems - Best Key Phrase Identification annotators had to face. A second problem was the different Following the recognition of key phrases, the subsequent view of a key phrase’s granularity level. Finally we detec- grouping needs to be revised. Due to the dependency on pha- ted some cases in which the annotators did not concentrate se 1, it is difficult to assess whether the same groupings have on the given guidelines producing poor annotations. Pha- been made. In an optimal scenario, starting from an equal se 2 and 3 could not be investigated meaningfully as phase set of key phrases, an Inter-Annotator Agreement could be 1 directly conditions the initial data situation of the other calculated for the same coding units and a set of classes phases. corresponding to the number of key phrase groups. These findings lead us to the assumption that, in order In order to be at least partially able to analyze how much to further increase the quality of the data corpus, experts the annotators in phase 2 agree in their decisions, only do- need to be taken into account. Healthcare professionals are cuments with an alpha greater than 0.439 (corresponding important but likewise social media experts are of interest to the average mean of phase 1) are considered. Furthermo- because of the particular vocabulary that is used in forums. re, documents whose annotators disagree on the number of Our data set showed very specific expressions that are on- units are excluded from consideration. With these restric- ly used in the online context of diabetes. Another fact we tions, we want to make sure that the same phrases were must address are the guidelines. These need to be revised detected in phase 1 allowing a small variation tolerance in with regard to the annotators insecurities concerning key order to build a suitable initial data situation for phase 2. phrase granularity, the rules for key phrase grouping and for Thus, we can measure the Inter-Annotator Agreement for choosing a representative key phrase. The annotators also these documents. As appropriate measures we use simple reported that the very subjective nature of the texts was percentage agreement P A on the one hand and Fleiss Kap- another difficulty. pa κ [5] on the other hand. We use DKPro Agreement for Summarized this first annotation approach on the GD- the calculation again. Unfortunately, only three documents WDS achieved promising results, especially in the main pha- meet the required criteria. For the first of them, all annota- se, phase 1. As the students had only a short introductory tors only assigned one key phrase unit. Accordingly, there class into the annotation task, this approach can be seen is only one group of key phrases and thus, both P A and κ as a crowd-sourcing attempt. However, to further increase are 1. The second document that fulfills the criteria contains annotation quality, we see an expert-based approach at an according to phase 1 two key phrase units. Every annotator advantage. In future work this issue will be addressed. Phase summarized them into the same group which leads to a per- 2 and 3 should be neglected until phase 1 produces results fect agreement in terms of both measures. Prevailing phase with a quality sufficient for the further phases. Nonetheless 3, it is to be noted that also the best nuggets were equal- the development of appropriate measures for dependent an- ly chosen. The last document consists of three units. While notation tasks may be an interesting area of research. three of four annotators completely agreed in dividing the If the annotation quality of the GDWDS is ensured, the units into two groups and making the same assignments, the actual process of keyphrase extraction can be started. As a fourth annotator fixed on three groups which finally lead to first step we plan to apply and evaluate state-of-the-art algo- a P A of 0.66 and κ = 0.38. The three annotators building rithms for key phrase extraction on GDWDS. Machine lear- the same groupings did, however, not agree on the best key ning algorithms and deep learning approaches are prevalent phrase per group. in this field. For example, in [18] an interesting approach to Since it is obvious that the quality of the dependent an- keyword extraction from Twitter using recurrent neural net- notations can only be analyzed to a limited extent and the- works is presented. Alternatively, rule-based or graph-based refore not very meaningful, we will not go further into phase approaches should be considered. In accordance with the re- 2 and 3 here. sults it can be evaluated whether these existing techniques can be applied to our problem. Depending on the results, new algorithms may then be developed. 4. CONCLUSION AND FURTHER WORK In this work we presented an annotation study of medi- cal information needs on a german diabetes data set. Stu- 5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS dent annotators were instructed to detect key phrases, group We want to thank the student annotators, namely Deniz them according to similar content and then to find a repre- Ates, Bashkim Berzati, Christian Born, Markus Brenneis, sentative key phrase for every group. 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