Samenvatting

We present a multilingual, open source system for cancer forum thread analysis, equipped with a biomedical entity tagger and a module for textual summarization. This system allows users to investi- gate textual co-occurrences of biomedical entities in forum posts, and to browse through summaries of long discussions. It is applied to a number of online cancer patient fora, including a gastro-intestinal cancer forum and a breast cancer forum. We propose that the system can serve as an extra source of information for medical hypothesis formulation, and as a facility for boosting patient empowerment.