@inproceedings{kim-nakashole-2022-data,
    title = "Data Augmentation for Rare Symptoms in Vaccine Side-Effect Detection",
    author = "Kim, Bosung  and
      Nakashole, Ndapa",
    editor = "Demner-Fushman, Dina  and
      Cohen, Kevin Bretonnel  and
      Ananiadou, Sophia  and
      Tsujii, Junichi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2022.bionlp-1.29/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.bionlp-1.29",
    pages = "310--315",
    abstract = "We study the problem of entity detection and normalization applied to patient self-reports of symptoms that arise as side-effects of vaccines. Our application domain presents unique challenges that render traditional classification methods ineffective: the number of entity types is large; and many symptoms are rare, resulting in a long-tail distribution of training examples per entity type. We tackle these challenges with an autoregressive model that generates standardized names of symptoms. We introduce a data augmentation technique to increase the number of training examples for rare symptoms. Experiments on real-life patient vaccine symptom self-reports show that our approach outperforms strong baselines, and that additional examples improve performance on the long-tail entities."
}