Objectives

Social media listening (SML) offers significant potential to understand pet owners’ perspectives, but its use in animal health remains underexplored. This study applied AI techniques to analyze frustrations and perceptions around NSAID usage, associated diseases, and veterinary treatments. By examining posts from diverse platforms, the study aimed to uncover insights into pet pain management and broader veterinary care trends over five years.

Methods

Publicly available social media posts were gathered using keyword-based web scraping. Despite applying keyword filters, irrelevant posts were frequently included. To address this, zero-shot learning was employed to filter irrelevant content effectively. Key themes were extracted using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and contextualized with large language models (LLMs). Additionally, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach was implemented to retrieve relevant social media posts based on OpenAI embeddings and Facebook AI Similarity Search (FAISS) indexing to generate concise summaries, ensuring a focused and accurate analysis of targeted topics. Posts were collected from various social media platforms, enabling a diverse understanding of pet owners’ experiences and challenges with NSAIDs.

Results

An initial keyword-driven web scrape collected social media posts (n=15,921), with n=9,434 (59.26%) deemed relevant following data pre-processing and zero-shot classification. Over 21 themes were extracted using NMF from sources including X and Reddit. Along with the NMF themes, we posed questions to the dataset using the RAG approach: these themes, contextualized through RAG querying, focused on pet pain management, chronic conditions like arthritis, post-surgical care, and veterinary approaches to acute and chronic care.

Conclusions

This study demonstrates the potential of AI techniques, NMF and RAG, to extract meaningful insights from social media data in animal health. The results highlight thematic overlaps across platforms, with each offering distinct perspectives. Insights can inform veterinarians, pharmaceuticals, and policymakers on addressing key challenges, improving NSAID education, and enhancing veterinary communication for chronic and acute condition management.