An answer recommendation framework for an online cancer community forum

Health community forums are a kind of online platform to discuss various matters related to management of illness. People are increasingly searching for answers online, particularly when they are diagnosed with cancer like life-threatening diseases. People seek suggestions or advice through these platforms to make decisions during their treatments. However, locating the correct information or similar people is often a great challenge for them. In this scenario, this paper proposes an answer recommendation system in an online breast cancer community forum that provide guidance and valuable references to users while making decisions. The answer is the summary of already discussed topic in the forum, so that they do not need to go through all the answer posts which spans over multiple pages or initiate a thread once again. There are three phases for the answer recommendation system, including query similarity model to retrieve the past similar query, query-answer pair generation and answer recommendation. Query similarity model is employed by a Siamese network with Bi-LSTM architecture which could achieve an F1-score of 85.5%. Also, the paper shows the efficacy of transfer learning technique to generalize the model well in our breast cancer query-query pair data set. The query-answer pairs are generated by an extractive summarization technique that is based on an optimization algorithm. The effectiveness of the generated summary is evaluated based on a manually generated summary, and the result shows a ROUGE-1 score of 49%.

Automated summary

Health community forums serve as online platforms for discussing illness management. When diagnosed with life-threatening diseases like cancer, people increasingly turn to these platforms for answers. This paper proposes an answer recommendation system in an online breast cancer community forum to guide users and provide valuable references for decision-making.