Jacob Berkowitz


2026

The aim of the Social Media Mining for Health Applications and Health Real-World Data (#SMM4H-HeaRD) shared tasks is to fos- ter the development and evaluation of natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence methods for analyzing health-related text from social media and other real-world data sources. For the 11th iteration, held online and co-located with ACL 2026, the workshop continued the expanded #SMM4H- HeaRD platform initiated in 2025, broaden-ing its scope beyond social media to include additional health real-world data sources such as clinical narratives and biomedical literature. The 8 shared tasks covered diverse data sources, health domains (e.g., adverse drug events, insomnia, influenza vaccine effectiveness, cancer staging, substance use), and task formulations (e.g., classification, named entity recognition, span extraction, and text generation). In total, 110 teams registered, representing 31 countries. In this paper, we present an overview of the datasets, participant systems, and performance results, providing insights into current methods for mining social media and health real-world data for biomedical and clinical applications.

2024

SMM4H 2024 Task 1 is focused on the identification of standardized Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) in tweets. We introduce a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method, leveraging the capabilities of Llama 3, GPT-4, and the SFR-embedding-mistral model, along with few-shot prompting techniques, to map colloquial tweet language to MedDRA Preferred Terms (PTs) without relying on extensive training datasets. Our method achieved competitive performance, with an F1 score of 0.359 in the normalization task and 0.392 in the named entity recognition (NER) task. Notably, our model demonstrated robustness in identifying previously unseen MedDRA PTs (F1=0.363) greatly surpassing the median task score of 0.141 for such terms.