Selection of pseudo-annotated data for adverse drug reaction classification across drug groups

Automatic monitoring of adverse drug events (ADEs) or reactions (ADRs) is currently receiving significant attention from the biomedical community. In recent years, user-generated data on social media has become a valuable resource for this task. Neural models have achieved impressive performance on automatic text classification for ADR detection. Yet, training and evaluation of these methods are carried out on user-generated texts about a targeted drug. In this paper, we assess the robustness of state-of-the-art neural architectures across different drug groups. We investigate several strategies to use pseudo-labeled data in addition to a manually annotated train set. Out-of-dataset experiments diagnose the bottleneck of supervised models in terms of breakdown performance, while additional pseudo-labeled data improves overall results regardless of the text selection strategy.Comment: Accepted to AIST 202

Interactive attention network for adverse drug reaction classification

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. Detection of new adverse drug reactions is intended to both improve the quality of medications and drug reprofiling. Social media and electronic clinical reports are becoming increasingly popular as a source for obtaining the health-related information, such as identification of adverse drug reactions. One of the tasks of extracting adverse drug reactions from social media is the classification of entities that describe the state of health. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of Interactive Attention Network for identification of adverse drug reactions from user reviews. We formulate this problem as a binary classification task. We show the effectiveness of this method on a number of publicly available corpora

Biomedical Information Extraction Pipelines for Public Health in the Age of Deep Learning

abstract: Unstructured texts containing biomedical information from sources such as electronic health records, scientific literature, discussion forums, and social media offer an opportunity to extract information for a wide range of applications in biomedical informatics. Building scalable and efficient pipelines for natural language processing and extraction of biomedical information plays an important role in the implementation and adoption of applications in areas such as public health. Advancements in machine learning and deep learning techniques have enabled rapid development of such pipelines. This dissertation presents entity extraction pipelines for two public health applications: virus phylogeography and pharmacovigilance. For virus phylogeography, geographical locations are extracted from biomedical scientific texts for metadata enrichment in the GenBank database containing 2.9 million virus nucleotide sequences. For pharmacovigilance, tools are developed to extract adverse drug reactions from social media posts to open avenues for post-market drug surveillance from non-traditional sources. Across these pipelines, high variance is observed in extraction performance among the entities of interest while using state-of-the-art neural network architectures. To explain the variation, linguistic measures are proposed to serve as indicators for entity extraction performance and to provide deeper insight into the domain complexity and the challenges associated with entity extraction. For both the phylogeography and pharmacovigilance pipelines presented in this work the annotated datasets and applications are open source and freely available to the public to foster further research in public health.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Biomedical Informatics 201