Recognizing mentions of adverse drug reaction in social media using knowledge-infused recurrent models

Abstract

Recognizing mentions of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR) in social media is challenging: ADR mentions are contextdependent and include long, varied and unconventional descriptions as compared to more formal medical symptom terminology. We use the CADEC corpus to train a recurrent neural network (RNN) transducer, integrated with knowledge graph embeddings of DBpedia, and show the resulting model to be highly accurate (93.4 F1). Furthermore, even when lacking high quality expert annotations, we show that by employing an active learning technique and using purpose built annotation tools, we can train the RNN to perform well (83.9 F1).