Concept space comparisons: explorations with five health domains

This paper explores methods to compare concept spaces derived from different discourses in a common health domain. The concept spaces are generated from the research literature and from message board discussions on the Internet. We explore a number of methods for comparing and contrasting concept space pairs. We experiment with five select health domains in this exploratory research: Autism, AIDS, Fibromyalgia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Multiple Sclerosis. The paper concludes with a discussion about the potential of our methods. Future work on refinements to our techniques is also outlined.