Spain

Previous approaches to NLP tasks on online patient forums have been limited to single posts as units, thereby neglecting the overarching conversational structure. In this paper we explore the benefit of exploiting conversational context for filtering posts relevant to a specific medical topic. We experiment with two approaches to add conversational context to a BERT model: a sequential CRF layer and manually engineered features. Although neither approach can outperform the F1 score of the BERT baseline, we find that adding a sequential layer improves precision for all target classes whereas adding a non-sequential layer with manually engineered features leads to a higher recall for two out of three target classes. Thus, depending on the end goal, conversation-aware modelling may be beneficial for identifying relevant messages. We hope our findings encourage other researchers in this domain to move beyond studying messages in isolation towards more discourse-based data collection and classification.

COLING 2020

Conversation-aware Filtering of Online Patient Forum Messages

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

The content I introduce is the winning system solution of TASK5 of SMM4H 2020. I will introduce the problems I have encountered and the solutions.

SMM4H 2020 Task5 1st Solution Sharing

Identifying patient information needs is an important issue for health care services and implementation of patient-centered care. A relevant number of people with diabetes mellitus experience a need for information during the course of the disease. Health-related online forums are a promising option for researching relevant information needs closely related to everyday life. In this paper, we present a novel data corpus comprising 4,664 contributions from an online diabetes forum in German language. Two annotation tasks were implemented. First, the contributions were categorised according to whether they contain a diabetes-specific information need or not, which might either be a non diabetes-specific information need or no information need at all, resulting in an agreement of 0.89 (Krippendorff’s α). Moreover, the textual content of diabetes-specific information needs was segmented and labeled using a well-founded definition of health-related information needs, which achieved a promising agreement of 0.82 (Krippendorff’s αu ). We further report a baseline for two sub-tasks of the information extraction system planned for the long term: contribution categorization and segment classification.

Annotating Patient Information Needs in Online Diabetes Forums

This presentation describes our winning system of SMM4H 2020 Task 1. This task challenged participants to detect tweets that mention medications or dietary supplements in a natural, highly imbalanced dataset. Our system combined a rule-based preprocessing step with a BERT-based ensemble classifier. Our system obtained F1 score at 85.35% and improved the average F1 score across all participating team by 19.07%.

Ensemble BERT for Classifying Medication-mentioning Tweets

Depression and anxiety are psychiatric disorders that are observed in many areas of everyday life. For example, these disorders manifest themselves somewhat frequently in texts written by nondiagnosed users in social media. However, detecting users with these conditions is not a straightforward task as they may not explicitly talk about their mental state, and if they do, contextual cues such as immediacy must be taken into account. When available, linguistic flags pointing to probable anxiety or depression could be used by medical experts to write better guidelines and treatments. In this paper, we develop a dataset designed to foster research in depression and anxiety detection in Twitter, framing the detection task as a binary tweet classification problem. We then apply state-of-the-art classification models to this dataset, providing a competitive set of baselines alongside qualitative error analysis. Our results show that language models perform reasonably well, and better than more traditional baselines. Nonetheless, there is clear room for improvement, particularly with unbalanced training sets and in cases where seemingly obvious linguistic cues (keywords) are used counter-intuitively.

Towards Preemptive Detection of Depression and Anxiety in Twitter

We present a study employing various techniques of text mining to explore and compare two different online forums focusing on depression: (1) the subreddit r/depression (over 60 million tokens), a large, open social media platform and (2) Beyond Blue (almost 5 million tokens), a professionally curated and moderated depression forum from Australia. We are interested in how the language and the content on these platforms differ from each other. We scrape both forums for a specific period. Next to general methods of computational text analysis, we focus on sentiment analysis, topic modeling and the distribution of word categories to analyze these forums. Our results indicate that Beyond Blue is generally more positive and that the users are more supportive to each other. Topic modeling shows that Beyond Blue’s users talk more about adult topics like finance and work while topics shaped by school or college terms are more prevalent on r/depression. Based on our findings we hypothesize that the professional curation and moderation of a depression forum is beneficial for the discussion in it.

Exploring Online Depression Forums via Text Mining: A Comparison of Reddit and a Curated Online Forum

In this paper, we described our systems for the first and second subtasks of Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task in 2020. The two subtasks are automatic classi-fication of medication mentions and adverse effect in tweets. Our systems for both subtasks are based on Robustly optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa) and our previous work at SMM4H’19. The best F1-scores achieved by our systems for subtask 1 and 2 were 0.7974 and 0.64 respec-tively, which outperformed the average F1-scores among all teams’ best runs by at least 0.13.

ISLab System for SMM4H Shared Task 2020

This presentation describes neural models developed for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2020 shared tasks. Specifically, we participated in two tasks. We investigate the use of a language representation model BERT pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of 5 million health-related user reviews in English and Russian. The ensemble of neural networks for extraction and normalization of adverse drug reactions ranked first among 7 teams at the SMM4H 2020 Task 3 and obtained a relaxed F1 of 46%. The BERT-based multilingual model for classification of English and Russian tweets that report adverse reactions ranked second among 16 and 7 teams at two first subtasks of the SMM4H 2019 Task 2 and obtained a relaxed F1 of 58% on English tweets and 51% on Russian tweets.

KFU NLP Team at SMM4H 2020 Tasks: Cross-lingual Transfer Learning with Pretrained Language Models for Drug Reactions

Our team participated in the second subtask for Russian language creating
a system to detect adverse drug reaction (ADR) presence in a text. For our submission, we exploited an ensemble model architecture, combining BERT’s extension for Russian language, Logistic Regression and domain-specific preprocessing pipeline. Our system was ranked first among others, achieving F-score of 0.51.

BERT implementation for detecting adverse drug effects mentions in Russian

The vast amount of data on social media presents significant opportunities and challenges for utilizing it as a resource for health informatics. The fifth iteration of the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) shared tasks sought to advance the use of Twitter data (tweets) for pharmacovigilance, toxicovigilance, and epidemiology of birth defects. In addition to re-runs of three tasks, #SMM4H 2020 included new tasks for detecting adverse effects of medications in French and Russian tweets, characterizing chatter related to prescription medication abuse, and detecting self reports of birth defect pregnancy outcomes. The five tasks required methods for binary classification, multi-class classification, and named entity recognition (NER). With 29 teams and a total of 130 system submissions, participation in the #SMM4H shared tasks continues to grow.

Overview of the #SMM4H 2020 Shared Tasks

Prior work in Argument Mining frequently alludes to its potential applications in automatic de-bating systems. Despite this focus, almost no datasets or models exist which apply natural language processing techniques to problems found within competitive formal debate. To remedy this, we present the DebateSum dataset1. DebateSum consists of 187,386 unique pieces of evidence with corresponding argument and extractive summaries. DebateSum was made using data compiled by competitors within the National Speech and Debate Association over a 7-year period. We train several transformer summarization models to benchmark summarization performance on DebateSum. We also introduce a set of fasttext word-vectors trained on DebateSum called debate2vec. Finally, we present a search engine for this dataset which is utilized extensively by members of the National Speech and Debate Association today. The DebateSum search engine is available to the public here: http://www.debate.cards

Conversation-aware Filtering of Online Patient Forum Messages

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Conversation-aware Filtering of Online Patient Forum Messages

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SMM4H 2020 Task5 1st Solution Sharing

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RoBERTa for detecting medications on Twitter

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