Abstract
Objective: Social media is becoming increasingly popular as a platform for sharing personal health-related information. This information can be utilized for public health monitoring tasks, particularly for pharmacovigilance, via the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques. However, the language in social media is highly informal, and userexpressed medical concepts are often nontechnical, descriptive, and challenging to extract. There has been limited progress in addressing these challenges, and thus far, advanced machine learning-based NLP techniques have been underutilized. Our objective is to design a machine learning-based approach to extract mentions of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from highly informal text in social media.
Methods: We introduce ADRMine, a machine learning-based concept extraction system that uses conditional random fields (CRFs). ADRMine utilizes a variety of features, including a novel feature for modeling words' semantic similarities. The similarities are modeled by clustering words based on unsupervised, pretrained word representation vectors (embeddings) generated from unlabeled user posts in social media using a deep learning technique.
Results: ADRMine outperforms several strong baseline systems in the ADR extraction task by achieving an F-measure of 0.82. Feature analysis demonstrates that the proposed word cluster features significantly improve extraction performance.
Conclusion: It is possible to extract complex medical concepts, with relatively high performance, from informal, usergenerated content. Our approach is particularly scalable, suitable for social media mining, as it relies on large volumes of unlabeled data, thus diminishing the need for large, annotated training data sets.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 671-681 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association |
Volume | 22 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - May 2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Copyright the Author(s) 2015. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.Keywords
- ADR
- Adverse drug reaction
- Deep learning word embeddings
- Machine learning
- Natural language processing
- Pharmacovigilance
- Social media mining