Title: Semi-Supervised Recurrent Neural Network for Adverse Drug Reaction Mention Extraction,
Abstract: Social media is an useful platform to share health-related information due to
its vast reach. This makes it a good candidate for public-health monitoring
tasks, specifically for pharmacovigilance. We study the problem of extraction
of Adverse-Drug-Reaction (ADR) mentions from social media, particularly from
twitter. Medical information extraction from social media is challenging,
mainly due to short and highly information nature of text, as compared to more
technical and formal medical reports.
Current methods in ADR mention extraction relies on supervised learning
methods, which suffers from labeled data scarcity problem. The State-of-the-art
method uses deep neural networks, specifically a class of Recurrent Neural
Network (RNN) which are Long-Short-Term-Memory networks (LSTMs)
\cite{hochreiter1997long}. Deep neural networks, due to their large number of
free parameters relies heavily on large annotated corpora for learning the end
task. But in real-world, it is hard to get large labeled data, mainly due to
heavy cost associated with manual annotation. Towards this end, we propose a
novel semi-supervised learning based RNN model, which can leverage unlabeled
data also present in abundance on social media. Through experiments we
demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving state-of-the-art
performance in ADR mention extraction.