Using Twitter to Learn about the Autism Community 21 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Tweet word count -1.0 0.0 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 6.0 7.0 8.0 Number of nouns ASD Control (a) Nouns 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Tweet word count -2.0 0.0 2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0 10.0 12.0 Number of verbs ASD Control (b) Verbs 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Tweet word count -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 Number of proper nouns ASD Control (c) Proper nouns 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Tweet word count 0.0 2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0 Number of pronouns ASD Control (d) Pronouns 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Tweet word count -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 Number of adjectives ASD Control (e) Adjectives 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Tweet word count -1.0 0.0 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 Number of adverbs ASD Control (f) Adverbs 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Tweet word count -1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 Number of interjections ASD Control (g) Interjections Fig. 7: A summary of the key results of comparative part-of-speech analysis. In all cases a statistically significant ( p < 0 . 05 ) difference between ASD and control sub-groups is observed. The most interesting insight is that tweets in the ASD sub-group are more focused on issues (syndromes, disorders, interventions, support, help, and so on) and individuals (mostly children), described by nouns, while the control tweets more often relate to what it is that their authors are doing (liking, wanting, going, thinking, etc).