The focus of this project is on applying natural language processing to patients’ description of pain. In particular, we will be using NLP to compare patients with acute pain with those who have been experiencing chronic pain. Some possible directions for the project can include thematic and semantic analysis. Questions we hope to answer with this project are: (1) how does a chronic patient describe pain?; (2) how does an acute pain patient describe pain?; (3) how do chronic pain and acute pain patients differ in their linguistic expression of pain?; (4) what is the role of metaphors in language around pain?; (5) what is the temporal relationship between pain transitions (from acute to chronic) and language?