This paper covers participation of the SINAI team in Tasks 5 and 10 of the Social Media Mining for Health (#SSM4H) workshop at COLING-2022. These tasks focus on leveraging Twitter posts written in Spanish for healthcare research. The objective of Task 5 was to classify tweets reporting COVID-19 symptoms, while Task 10 required identifying disease mentions in Twitter posts. The presented systems explore large RoBERTa language models pre-trained on Twitter data in the case of tweet classification task and general-domain data for the disease recognition task. We also present a text pre-processing methodology implemented in both systems and describe an initial weakly-supervised fine-tuning phase alongside with a submission post-processing procedure designed for Task 10. The systems obtained 0.84 F1-score on the Task 5 and 0.77 F1-score on Task 10.

In this paper we present SHARE, a new lexical resource with 10,125 offensive terms and expressions collected from Spanish speakers. We retrieve this vocabulary using an existing chatbot developed to engage a conversation with users and collect insults via Telegram, named Fiero. This vocabulary has been manually labeled by five annotators obtaining a kappa coefficient agreement of 78.8%. In addition, we leverage the lexicon to release the first corpus in Spanish for offensive span identification research named OffendES_spans. Finally, we show the utility of our resource as an interpretability tool to explain why a comment may be considered offensive.

This paper describes the participation of SINAI team at Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection which consists of identifying spans that make a text toxic. Although several resources and systems have been developed so far in the context of offensive language, both annotation and tasks have mainly focused on classifying whether a text is offensive or not. However, detecting toxic spans is crucial to identify why a text is toxic and can assist human moderators to locate this type of content on social media. In order to accomplish the task, we follow a deep learning-based approach using a Bidirectional variant of a Long Short Term Memory network along with a stacked Conditional Random Field decoding layer (BiLSTM-CRF). Specifically, we test the performance of the combination of different pre-trained word embeddings for recognizing toxic entities in text. The results show that the combination of word embeddings helps in detecting offensive content. Our team ranks 29th out of 91 participants.

This paper describes the entry of the research group SINAI at SMM4H’s ProfNER task on the identification of professions and occupations in social media related with health. Specifically we have participated in Task 7a: Tweet Binary Classification to determine whether a tweet contains mentions of occupations or not, as well as in Task 7b: NER Offset Detection and Classification aimed at predicting occupations mentions and classify them discriminating by professions and working statuses.

Pre-trained text encoders have rapidly advanced the state-of-the-art on many Natural Language Processing tasks. This paper presents the use of transfer learning methods applied to the automatic detection of codes in radiological reports in Spanish. Assigning codes to a clinical document is a popular task in NLP and in the biomedical domain. These codes can be of two types: standard classifications (e.g. ICD-10) or specific to each clinic or hospital. In this study we show a system using specific radiology clinic codes. The dataset is composed of 208,167 radiology reports labeled with 89 different codes. The corpus has been evaluated with three methods using the BERT model applied to Spanish: Multilingual BERT, BETO and XLM. The results are interesting obtaining 70% of F1-score with a pre-trained multilingual model.

Over time the use of social networks is becoming very popular platforms for sharing health related information. Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) provides tasks such as those described in this document to help manage information in the health domain. This document shows the first participation of the SINAI group. We study approaches based on machine learning and deep learning to extract adverse drug reaction mentions from Twitter. The results obtained in the tasks are encouraging, we are close to the average of all participants and even above in some cases.

In this paper we describe a new named entity extraction system. Our work proposes a system for the identification and annotation of drug names in Spanish biomedical texts based on machine learning and deep learning models. Subsequently, a standardized code using Snomed is assigned to these drugs, for this purpose, Natural Language Processing tools and techniques have been used, and a dictionary of different sources of information has been built. The results are promising, we obtain 78% in F1 score on the first sub-track and in the second task we map with Snomed correctly 72% of the found entities.

Mental health is one of the main concerns of today’s society. Early detection of symptoms can greatly help people with mental disorders. People are using social networks more and more to express emotions, sentiments and mental states. Thus, the treatment of this information using NLP technologies can be applied to the automatic detection of mental problems such as eating disorders. However, the first step to solving the problem should be to provide a corpus in order to evaluate our systems. In this paper, we specifically focus on detecting anorexia messages on Twitter. Firstly, we have generated a new corpus of tweets extracted from different accounts including anorexia and non-anorexia messages in Spanish. The corpus is called SAD: Spanish Anorexia Detection corpus. In order to validate the effectiveness of the SAD corpus, we also propose several machine learning approaches for automatically detecting anorexia symptoms in the corpus. The good results obtained show that the application of textual classification methods is a promising option for developing this kind of system demonstrating that these tools could be used by professionals to help in the early detection of mental problems.