Prediction of Personal Experience Tweets of Medication Use via Contextual Word Representations.
Jiang, Keyuan;Chen, Tingyu;Calix, Ricardo A;Bernard, Gordon R;
conference proceedings : annual international conference of the ieee engineering in medicine and biology society ieee engineering in medicine and biology society annual conference2019Vol. 2019pp. 6093-6096
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jiang2019predictionconference
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.