Computational Health Communication

This entry provides an introduction to computational health communication as an emerging field. We explain five major applications of computational health communication involving opinion mining, predicting group membership, identifying patterns in texts, determining connections between entities, and performing simulations. We also discuss some of the tools employed in these applications, including dictionary-based text classification, supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches, social network analysis, and agent-based modeling. We conclude by pointing out several challenges and pitfalls in computational health communication, and providing suggestions for further research.