People on Drugs: Credibility of User Statements in Health Communities

Online health communities are a valuable source of information for patients and physicians. However, such user-generated resources are often plagued by inaccuracies and misinformation. In this work we propose a method for automatically establishing the credibility of user-generated medical statements and the trustworthiness of their authors by exploiting linguistic cues and distant supervision from expert sources. To this end we introduce a probabilistic graphical model that jointly learns user trustworthiness, statement credibility, and language objectivity. We apply this methodology to the task of extracting rare or unknown side-effects of medical drugs --- this being one of the problems where large scale non-expert data has the potential to complement expert medical knowledge. We show that our method can reliably extract side-effects and filter out false statements, while identifying trustworthy users that are likely to contribute valuable medical information

Chemical named entities recognition: a review on approaches and applications

The rapid increase in the flow rate of published digital information in all disciplines has resulted in a pressing need for techniques that can simplify the use of this information. The chemistry literature is very rich with information about chemical entities. Extracting molecules and their related properties and activities from the scientific literature to "text mine" these extracted data and determine contextual relationships helps research scientists, particularly those in drug development. One of the most important challenges in chemical text mining is the recognition of chemical entities mentioned in the texts. In this review, the authors briefly introduce the fundamental concepts of chemical literature mining, the textual contents of chemical documents, and the methods of naming chemicals in documents. We sketch out dictionary-based, rule-based and machine learning, as well as hybrid chemical named entity recognition approaches with their applied solutions. We end with an outlook on the pros and cons of these approaches and the types of chemical entities extracte

UNSUPERVISED DYNAMIC TOPIC MODEL FOR EXTRACTING ADVERSE DRUG REACTION FROM HEALTH FORUMS

The relationship between drug and its side effects has been outlined in two websites: Sider and WebMD. The aim of this study was to find the association between drug and its side effects. We compared the reports of typical users of a web site called: "Ask a patient" website with reported drug side effects in reference sites such as Sider and WebMD. In addition, the typical users' comments on highly-commented drugs (Neurotic drugs, Anti-Pregnancy drugs and Gastrointestinal drugs) were analyzed, using deep learning method. To this end, typical users' comments on drugs' side effects, during last decades, were collected from the website “Ask a patient”. Then, the data on drugs were classified based on deep learning model (HAN) and the drugs' side effect. And the main topics of side effects for each group of drugs were identified and reported, through Sider and WebMD websites. Our model demonstrates its ability to accurately describe and label side effects in a temporal text corpus by a deep learning classifier which is shown to be an effective method to precisely discover the association between drugs and their side effects. Moreover, this model has the capability to immediately locate information in reference sites to recognize the side effect of new drugs, applicable for drug companies. This study suggests that the sensitivity of internet users and the diverse scientific findings are for the benefit of dis¬tinct detection of adverse effects of drugs, and deep learning would facilitate it