Sentiment Analysis of Pharmaceutical Data on Social Media: Nooj as an NLP Processor

In the context of healthcare and pharmaceutical industry, social media users currently generate amounts of subjective data. These data take the form of patient reviews and social media discussions about health and pharmaceutical services, specific drugs, or treatments. Because of its big size, these textual data represent a challenge to process and analyze without the use of NLP technology. Sentiment analysis as an NLP technique helps pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers gain new insights, make timely informed decisions, and improve drug development and treatment strategies out of the data. Thus, achieve improved outcomes and good quality of life for people. Our current research addresses mining Facebook customer reviews on pharmaceutical services. It adopts an NLP approach to evaluate the sentiment in customer reviews regarding the service given by a particular pharmacy. The research utilizes a linguistic-based approach using Nooj platform for sentiment classification of pharmaceutical data according to the polarity of the reviews. Nooj is a linguistic processing platform supporting multiple languages, designed to analyze and process natural language texts for various linguistic tasks and provides a range of linguistic tools for analyzing and studying various linguistic phenomena. The study begins by collecting a corpus of social media posts related to pharmaceutical services of an enterprise. The collected data are then preprocessed, followed by building a Nooj electronic lexicon. Next, a local grammar is built to make the platform identify the linguistic structures embedding sentiments. Next, a linguistic analysis is applied to the corpus and the local grammar is applied to identify positive and negative sentiments. Our linguistic approach yields encouraging and promising results and this can help in understanding public sentiment towards pharmaceutical products and services and making informed decisions for the better of the customer and the pharmacy. Identifying areas for improvement and enhancing the quality of services are the ultimate goal for healthcare providers, which can be served via analyzing social media posts.