Discourse Analysis of User Forums in an Online Weight Loss Application

Online social communities are becoming increasingly popular platforms for people to share information, seek emotional sup-port, and maintain accountability for los-ing weight. Studying the language and discourse in these communities can offer insights on how users benefit from using these applications. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of language and dis-course patterns in forum posts by users who lose weight and keep it off versus users with fluctuating weight dynamics. Our results reveal differences about how the types of posts, polarity of sentiments