**6. Conclusions**

Hearing loss is the most frequently occurring human sensory deficit and has many di fferent causes. Hearing loss is also known to be related to many other health issues. Analyzing patient-authored questions can be a useful approach to better understand patients' perceptions, concerns and needs. Traditional surveys are limited to small sample sizes. However, social Q&A o ffers a new environment for patients to easily share various opinions and medical experiences, so a large volume of patient-authored data can accumulate. Exploring how patients with hearing loss use social questions and answers to find health information not only helps to identify a set of critical topics and issues for various types of research but also improves communication between patients and healthcare professionals. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first analysis of patient-authored contents on the topic of hearing loss from the social Q&A community, and these results provide valuable methodological and content insights.

This study provides a computational linguistic approach to perform an in-depth analysis using patient-authored data from sizeable online data sets. Our framework decodes public health views from hearing loss-related questions, which can be useful for developing adequate healthcare and public health promotion interventions. Our results reveal that those characterized topics ranging from sudden deafness to hearing aids are both representative and meaningful, and mostly correspond to sub-fields established in hearing science research.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, J.B. and C.H.L.; Data curation, C.H.L.; Formal analysis, J.B. and C.H.L.; Funding acquisition, J.B. and C.H.L.; Investigation, J.B.; Project administration, J.B.; Software, C.H.L.; Supervision, J.B.; Writing—original draft, J.B. and C.H.L.; Writing—review & editing, J.B. and C.H.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019S1A5A2A01039904). This research was partially funded by the UAE University, gran<sup>t</sup> number G00002617 (Funding No. 31B088).

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
