Natural Language Processing Tools for Assessing Progress and Outcome of Two Veteran Populations: Insights from a Novel Online Intervention for Post Traumatic Growth.

Over 100 million Americans lack affordable access to behavioral health care, and among these, military veterans are an especially vulnerable population. Military veterans require unique behavioral health services that can address military experiences and challenges transitioning to the civilian sector. Real world programs to help veterans successfully transition to civilian life must build a sense of community, have the ability to scale, and be able to reach the many veterans who cannot or will not access care. Digitally based behavioral health initiatives have emerged within the past few years to improve this access to care. Our novel behavioral health intervention teaches mindfulness-based CBT and narrative therapy using peer support groups as guides, with human facilitated asynchronous online discussions. Our study applies natural language processing (NLP) analytics to assess effectiveness of our on-line intervention, to test whether NLP may provide insights and detect nuances of personal change and growth that are not currently captured by subjective symptom measures.To study the value of natural language processing (NLP) analytics in assessing progress and outcomes among combat veterans and military sexual assault survivors participating in novel online interventions for post traumatic growth.IBM Watson and Linguistic Inquiry Word Count tools were applied to the narrative writings of combat veterans and survivors of military sexual trauma who participated in novel online peer supported group therapies for post traumatic growth. Participants watched videos; practiced skills such as mindfulness meditation; told their stories through narrative writing; and participated in asynchronous, facilitated online discussions with peers. The writings, including online postings, by the 16 participants who completed the program were analyzed after completion of the program.Our results suggest that NLP can provide valuable insights on shifts in personality traits, personal values and needs, as well as emotional tone in an evaluation of our novel online behavioral health interventions. Emotional tone analysis demonstrated significant decreases in fear/anxiety, sadness, and disgust, as well as increases in joy. Significant effects were found for personal values and needs such as needing/desiring closeness and helping others, and for personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (aka emotional range). Participants also demonstrated increases in authenticity and clout (confidence) of expression. NLP results were generally supported by qualitative observations and analysis, structured data and course feedback.The aggregate of results in our study suggest the effectiveness of our behavioral health intervention and that NLP can provide valuable insights on shifts in personality traits, personal values and needs, as well as measure changes in emotional tone. NLP's sensitivity to changes in emotional tone, values and personality strengths suggest efficacy of NLP as a leading indicator of treatment progress.