The unprecedented growth of Internet users has resulted in an abundance of unstructured information on social media including health forums, where patients request health-related information or opinions from other users. Previous studies have shown that online peer support has limited effectiveness without expert intervention. Therefore, a system capable of assessing the severity of health state from the patients' social media posts can help health professionals (HP) in prioritizing the user’s post. In this study, we inspect the efficacy of different aspects of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to identify the severity of the user’s health state in relation to two perspectives(tasks) (a) Medical Condition (i.e., Recover, Exist, Deteriorate, Other) and (b) Medication (i.e., Effective, Ineffective, Serious Adverse Effect, Other) in online health communities. We propose a multiview learning framework that models both the textual content as well as contextual-information to assess the severity of the user’s health state. Specifically, our model utilizes the NLU views such as sentiment, emotions, personality, and use of figurative language to extract the contextual information. The diverse NLU views demonstrate its effectiveness on both the tasks and as well as on the individual disease to assess a user’s health.

The rate of publishing scientific articles is ever increasing which has created difficulty for the researchers to learn about the recent advancements in a faster way. Also, relying on the abstract of these published articles is not a good idea as they cover only broad idea of the article. The summarization of scientific documents (SDS) addresses this challenge. In this paper, we propose a system for SDS having two components: identifying the relevant sentences in the article using citation context; generation of the summary by posing SDS as a binary optimization problem. For the purpose of optimization, a meta-heuristic evolutionary algorithm is utilized. In order to improve the quality of summary, various aspects measuring the relevance of sentences are simultaneously optimized using the concept of multi-objective optimization. Inspired by the popularity of graph-based algorithms like LexRank which is popularly used in solving summarization problems of different real-life applications, its impact is studied in fusion with our optimization framework. An ablation study is also performed to identify the most contributing aspects for the summary generation. We investigated the performance of our proposed framework on two datasets related to the computational linguistic domain, CL-SciSumm 2016 and CL-SciSumm 2017, in terms of ROUGE measures. The results obtained show that our framework effectively improves other existing methods. Further, results are validated using the statistical paired t-test.