On the interpretation of the effects of the Infliximab treatment on Crohn’s disease patients from Facebook posts: a human vs. machine comparison

This paper completes an analysis started a few years ago which has exploited Facebook as a tool suitable for collecting and analyzing Crohn’s disease patients’ reactions to the Infliximab treatment. We here finish off such work by comparing the satisfaction recorded with the use of sentiment analysis techniques as provided by intelligent tools for subjectivity analysis (e.g., OpinionFinder) against the satisfaction recorded by human experts (both physicians and non-medical experts). In summary, the following results appear to be of particular interest: (i) the Infliximab treatment confirms its efficacy as a result of the interpretations of Facebook posts given by both automatic tools and human experts, (ii) physicians tend to classify as neutral many posts on Infliximab that non-medical experts classified as negative, and (iii) OpinionFinder is inclined to confirm the evaluations provided by medical experts.