Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Using Twitter to Learn about the Autism Community Adham Beykikhoshk, Ognjen Arandjelovi´c, Dinh Phung, Svetha Venkatesh, and Terry Caelli the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later Abstract Considering the raising socio-economic burden of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), timely and evidence-driven public policy decision making and communication of the latest guidelines pertaining to the treatment and management of the disorder is crucial. Yet ev- idence suggests that policy makers and medical practitioners do not always have a good understanding of the practices and relevant beliefs of ASD-afflicted individuals’ carers who often follow questionable recommendations and adopt advice poorly supported by scientific data. The key goal of the present work is to explore the idea that Twitter, as a highly popular platform for information exchange, could be used as a data-mining source to learn about the population affected by ASD – their behaviour, concerns, needs etc. To this end, using a large data set of over 11 million harvested tweets as the basis for our investigation, we describe a series of experiments which examine a range of linguistic and semantic aspects of messages posted by individuals interested in ASD. Our findings, the first of their nature in the published scientific literature, strongly motivate additional research on this topic and present a methodological basis for further work. arXiv:1506.00246v1 [cs.SI] 31 May 2015 Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics (PRaDA) School of Information Technology Deaking University Waurn Ponds Geelong 3216 VIC Australia