An international team of researchers recently developed an AI system that stitches together information from dark web cryptocurrency markets, Twitter, and Reddit to better understand drug abusers.
please do not worry. We do not track sales or expose our users. This helps scientists better understand how drug abusers feel and what terms they use to describe their experience.
Although the relationship between mental health and substance abuse has been well studied in clinical settings, how users discuss and interact with each other in the real world remains beyond the scope of most scientific research.
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According to the team's paper:
Recent results from the Global Drug Survey show that the proportion of participants purchasing medicines through virtual currency markets has tripled since 2014, reaching 15 percent of respondents (GDS) in 2020.
This study evaluates social media data from active opioid users to understand behaviors related to opioid use and identifies what types of emotions are expressed. We use deep learning models to perform sentiment and sentiment analysis of social media data using pharmaceutical entities derived from the crypto market.
The team developed an AI that crawls three popular cryptocurrency markets where drugs are sold to determine nuanced information about what people are searching for and buying.
Next, to gather emotional sentiment, we crawled popular drug-related subreddits on Reddit, such as r/opifyates and r/drugnerds, for posts related to crypto market terms. Ta. Researchers found it difficult to collect enough Reddit posts that were easy to label emotional sentiments, but found that Twitter posts with relevant hashtags could fill in the gaps. did.
The end result was a treasure trove of data that allowed the team to determine robust sentiment analysis for a variety of substances.
In the future, the team hopes to find ways to improve access to dark web crypto markets in order to create more powerful emotional models. The ultimate goal of this project is to help medical professionals better understand the relationship between mental health and substance abuse.
According to the team's paper:
Identifying the best strategies to reduce opioid misuse requires a deeper understanding of how crypto market drug sales influence consumption and how it reflects social media discussions there is.
