Deep Learning for Identification of Adverse Effect Mentions in Twitter Data

Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) Adverse Effect Mentions Shared Task challenges participants to accurately identify spans of text within a tweet that correspond to Adverse Effects (AEs) resulting from medication usage (Weissenbacher et al., 2019). This task features a training data set of 2,367 tweets, in addition to a 1,000 tweet evaluation data set. The solution presented here features a bidirectional Long Shortterm Memory Network (bi-LSTM) for the generation of character-level embeddings. It uses a second bi-LSTM trained on both character and token level embeddings to feed a Conditional Random Field (CRF) which provides the final classification. This paper further discusses the deep learning algorithms used in our solution.