播音\撰文：卡伦·霍普金（Karen Hopkin）

翻译 Ada

审校：潘磊

If you’ve ever checked out the restaurant reviews on Yelp, you know that these little missives can tell you whether a bistro is overpriced or understaffed or just nothing to write home about. But they may also be able to tell the local health department whether an establishment has been serving up Salmonella.

如果你曾浏览过Yelp（类似国内的大众点评）上的餐评，你就会意识到这些短小的评论会告诉你这个小餐馆是不是收费过高或者服务人手不足，又或者并没有什么值得一提的亮点。事实上，这些评论还可以告诉当地的卫生部门，一家店有没有把沙门氏菌端上餐桌（即有没有卫生问题）。

Researchers at Columbia University in New York City were looking into an outbreak of food poisoning at a local restaurant a few years ago when they got the idea of using social media to track gastrointestinal disturbances.

哥伦比亚大学的研究人员正在调查几年前，当地一家餐馆中发生的食物中毒事件。在调查过程中，他们突然想到，是否可以利用社交媒体来寻找有关胃肠问题的信息。

“During the investigation, the Department of Health noted that patrons had reported their illnesses on yelp in the reviews but hadn’t reported them via 311, the city’s official reporting service.”

“在调查过程中，卫生部门注意到，消费者会在yelp的评价中提到他们觉得身体不舒服，但是并不会通过311（市政府服务热线）向政府相关部门报告。”研究的领导者，计算机学家托马斯 艾弗伦说道。

Computer scientist Thomas Effland, who led the study.

Previous investigations had shown that monitoring social media for keywords associated with illness was a good way of rapidly identifying outbreaks of infectious diseases…such as the flu. So Effland and his team built a similar system for stomach symptoms. The Department of Health started using it in 2012.

先前的调查结果已经说明：在社交媒体上，监控一些与疾病相关的关键词，是一种不错的途径去识别一些传播性疾病的爆发……比如说流感。所以，艾弗伦和他的团队为胃肠疾病症状建立了一个相似的系统。卫生部门从2012年起开始使用该系统。

“The tool works by sifting through the recent Yelp reviews for New York City restaurants each day to identify potential reports of foodborne illness.”

“这个系统每天会筛查Yelp网站上关于纽约餐馆的评论，来寻找食物中毒事件的隐性报道。”

Yelp reviews get scanned for telltale terms such as “vomit,” “diarrhea,” “food poisoning,” and “sick.” Flagged entries then then get passed along to epidemiologists for a closer look.

Yelp网站的评论中含有“呕吐”、“腹泻”、“食物中毒”、“不舒服”等可能暗示有食物中毒现象的词汇都会得到关注。标记的信息后都会被送到流行病学家那里进行进一步地分析。

The system has produced some false positives, for example, from reviews that stated things like, the food “had a weird chunky consistency…hopefully we won’t get sick tonight.” And it missed a few posts, like when the writer misspelled “diarrhea” (a challenging word to write down even when you don’t have it).

系统有时候会判断失误。比如，有一些评论会出现：食物“中有一些非常奇怪的结块，希望我们今天晚上身体不会难受”。而且系统某些情况下会遗漏了一些评论信息，比如消费者在写评论时拼错了“腹泻（diarrhea）”这个单词。（这是一个具挑战性的单词）

But overall, the results are nothing to sneeze at. Or in this case, bark at.

但总而言之，研究结果并非无足轻重。或者说，这项研究的价值无可非议。

“We found that using Yelp data has helped the Health Department identify approximately 1,500 complaints of foodborne illness in New York City each year. In total the system has found 8,523 complaints since July 2012, resulting in the identification of 10 outbreaks.”

The study is in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. [Thomas Effland et al., Discovering foodborne illness in online restaurant reviews]

“我们可以知道利用Yelp的数据帮助卫生部门鉴定了大约每年1500起发生在纽约市的食物中毒事件。自2012年7月起，该系统总共发掘出8523起投诉。并帮助鉴定出十起大规模食物中毒事件。”这个研究被发表在《美国医疗信息通讯》杂志上。

The researchers plan to extend their analysis to Twitter. After all, many people use Twitter to let everyone know that they’re not well.

研究人员计划将他们的研究方式拓展到推特上。毕竟大多数人都习惯用推特来告诉别人自己的不适。