Identifying insomnia from social media posts: psycholinguistic analyses of user tweets

Abstract

Many people suffer from insomnia, a sleep disorder characterized by difficulty falling and staying asleep during the night. As social media have become a ubiquitous platform to share users’ thoughts, opinions, activities, and preferences with their friends and acquaintances, the shared content across these platforms can be used to diagnose different health problems, including insomnia. Only a few recent studies have examined the prediction of insomnia from Twitter data, and we found research gaps in predicting insomnia from word usage patterns and correlations between users’ insomnia and their Big 5 personality traits as derived from social media interactions.