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Can anonymous posters on medical forums be reidentified?
Victoria Bobicev1, Marina Sokolova, Khaled El Emam
1Technical University of Moldova, Chisinau, Moldova, Republic Of.
Journal of Medical Internet Research
|October 5, 2013
Summary
Authorship attribution technology can identify individuals posting anonymously on medical forums. Character-based analysis proves more effective than word-based methods for this task, even with short messages.
Area of Science:
- Natural Language Processing
- Computational Linguistics
- Cybersecurity
Background:
- Online medical forums facilitate sharing of personal health information.
- Anonymity is sought through pseudonyms, but writing styles may reveal identity.
- Automated authorship attribution research is limited for medical forums.
Purpose of the Study:
- Develop an automated system for accurate authorship attribution in medical forums.
- Utilize text analysis to correlate messages by the same author.
- Process unstructured text regardless of content or context.
Main Methods:
- Collected 6000 messages from two in vitro fertilization (IVF) support forums.
- Labeled messages with participant nicknames for evaluation.
- Evaluated system performance using character-based and word-based attribution.
Main Results:
- Achieved 75-80% F-score accuracy for short messages (100-150 words).
- Reached 97.9% accuracy for longer messages (≥300 words).
- Character-based attribution outperformed word-based methods.
Conclusions:
- Authorship is detectable even in short, anonymous medical forum posts.
- The effectiveness of anonymity on medical forums is questionable.
- Authorship attribution tools can inform users about potential identity disclosure.
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