Fine Grained Categorization of Drug Usage Tweets

Drug misuse and overdose has plagued the United States over the past decades and has severely impacted several communities and families. Often, it is difficult for drug users to get the assistance they need and thus many usage cases remain undetected until it is too late. With the booming age of social media, many users often prefer to discuss their emotions through virtual environments where they can also meet others dealing with similar problems. The widespread use of social media sites creates interesting new opportunities to apply NLP techniques to analyze content and potentially help those drug users (e.g., early detection and intervention). To tap into such opportunities, we study categorization of tweets about drug usage into fine-grained categories. To facilitate the study of the proposed new problem, we create a new dataset and use this data to study the effectiveness of multiple representative categorization methods. We further analyze errors made by these methods and explore new features to improve them. We find that a new feature based on tweet tone is quite useful in improving classification scores. We further explore possible downstream applications based on this classification system and provide a set of preliminary findings.