Prediction of Personal Experience Tweets of Medication Use via Contextual Word Representations

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2019 Jul:2019:6093-6096. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2019.8856753.

Abstract

Continuous monitoring the safe use of medication is an important task in pharmacovigilance. The first-hand experiences of medication effects come from the consumers of the pharmaceuticals. Social media have been considered as a possible alternative data source for gathering consumer-generated information of their experience with medications. Identifying personal experience in social media data is a challenging task in natural language processing. In this study, we investigated a method of predicating personal experience tweets using Google's Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and neural networks, in which BERT models contextually represented the tweet text. Both pre-trained BERT models and our BERT model trained with 3.2 million unlabeled tweets were examined. Our results show that our trained BERT model performs better than Google's pre-trained models (p <; 0.01). This suggests that domain-specific data may contribute to the BERT model yielding better classification performance in predicting personal experience tweets of medication use.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Electric Power Supplies
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Pharmacovigilance
  • Social Media*