Lexical Normalization of User-Generated Medical Forum Data

In the medical domain, user-generated social media text is increasingly used as a valuable complementary knowledge source to scientific medical literature. The extraction of this knowledge is complicated by colloquial language use and misspellings. Yet, lexical normalization of such data has not been addressed properly. This paper presents an unsupervised, data-driven spelling correction module for medical social media. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art spelling correction and can detect mistakes with an F-0.5 of 0.888. Additionally, we present a novel corpus for spelling mistake detection and correction on a medical patient forum.