Extracted questions were clustered into distinct topics by Top2Vec and hierarchical clustering. From these, 63,006 questions were extracted using a research-purpose BERT language model tested and fine-tuned on 500 hand-annotated questions. Public posts (N=52,576) from 1/2020-1/2022 were extracted from r/LoseIt, a Reddit weight loss forum of 3.8M members. We used health narratives posted in a weight loss forum to research topics of information being sought. Understanding unmet information needs may enable more tailored weight guidance.
People with obesity may seek clinical, nutritional, activity, and psychosocial guidance, but recommendations they receive in clinical settings may be inadequate or lack sufficient personalization to be implemented into their lives.
