Share Paper: Twitter as a Topic Analysis Tool for Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Text Mining Approach

1. Okan Arslan, Texas Tech University, United States
2. Fethi Inan, Texas Tech University, United States

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to analyze social media trends for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by using twitter data to understand the common topics related to ASD in twitter. To do so, #autism hashtag was used to gather data from twitter and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm was used as a text mining approach for topic analysis. According to the LDA and content analysis results, the most frequent topics about autism mentioned by the twitter users are “need for parental support”, “communication and interactions skills and resources”, and “cause of autism”.