Arul Mishra has been awarded funding from the University of Utah’s Research Incentive Seed Grant Program. The aim of the research is how discourse about the opioid crisis affected its identification as a crisis. Many features can affect discourse about an event e.g. were opioids initially considered to have curative properties that later turned addictive? Did discussion about morality and stigma change the discourse? How did sentiment towards opioid consumption result in its identification as a crisis? Can features of the discourse help in communicating the harms and in containing the opioid crisis? We use artificial intelligence algorithms to mine text produced by people across several years to examine how discourse about opioid consumption changed. The algorithm helps in mining even implicit opinions and sentiments.
Arul Mishra is the David Eccles Professor of Marketing at the University of Utah.