Identifying Insomnia From Social Media Posts: Psycholinguistic Analyses of User Tweets

BACKGROUND: 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. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to build an insomnia prediction model from users’ psycholinguistic patterns, including the elements of word usage, semantics, and their Big 5 personality traits as derived from tweets. METHODS: In this paper, we exploited both psycholinguistic and personality traits derived from tweets to identify insomnia patients. First, we built psycholinguistic profiles of the users from their word choices and the semantic relationships between the words of their tweets. We then determined the relationship between a users’ personality traits and insomnia. Finally, we built a double-weighted ensemble classification model to predict insomnia from both psycholinguistic and personality traits as derived from user tweets. RESULTS: Our classification model showed strong prediction potential (78.8%) to predict insomnia from tweets. As insomniacs are generally ill-tempered and feel more stress and mental exhaustion, we observed significant correlations of certain word usage patterns among them. They tend to use negative words (eg, “no,” “not,” “never”). Some people frequently use swear words (eg, “damn,” “piss,” “fuck”) with strong temperament. They also use anxious (eg, “worried,” “fearful,” “nervous”) and sad (eg, “crying,” “grief,” “sad”) words in their tweets. We also found that the users with high neuroticism and conscientiousness scores for the Big 5 personality traits likely have strong correlations with insomnia. Additionally, we observed that users with high conscientiousness scores have strong correlations with insomnia patterns, while negative correlation between extraversion and insomnia was also found. CONCLUSIONS: Our model can help predict insomnia from users’ social media interactions. Thus, incorporating our model into a software system can help family members detect insomnia problems in individuals before they become worse. The software system can also help doctors to diagnose possible insomnia in patients.