The global growth of social media usage over the past decade has opened research avenues for mining health related information that can ultimately be used to improve public health. The Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) shared tasks in its sixth iteration sought to advance the use of social media texts such as Twitter for pharmacovigilance, disease tracking and patient centered outcomes. #SMM4H 2021 hosted a total of eight tasks that included reruns of adverse drug effect extraction in English and Russian and newer tasks such as detecting medication non-adherence from Twitter and WebMD forum, detecting self-reported adverse pregnancy outcomes, detecting cases and symptoms of COVID-19, identifying occupations mentioned in Spanish by Twitter users, and detecting self-reported breast cancer diagnosis. The eight tasks included a total of 12 individual subtasks spanning three languages requiring methods for binary classification, multi-class classification, named entity recognition and entity normalization. With a total of 97 registering teams and 40 teams submitting predictions, the interest in the shared tasks grew by 70% and participation grew by 38% compared to the previous iteration.

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.

This work is devoted to semantic role labeling (SRL) task in Russian. We investigate the role of transfer learning strategies between English FrameNet and Russian FrameBank corpora. We perform experiments with embeddings obtained from various types of multilingual language models, including BERT, XLM-R, MUSE, and LASER. For evaluation, we use a Russian FrameBank dataset. As source data for transfer learning, we experimented with the full version of FrameNet and the reduced dataset with a smaller number of semantic roles identical to FrameBank. Evaluation results demonstrate that BERT embeddings show the best transfer capabilities. The model with pretraining on the reduced English SRL data and fine-tuning on the Russian SRL data show macro-averaged F1-measure of 79.8%, which is above our baseline of 78.4%.

This paper describes a system developed for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2019 shared tasks. Specifically, we participated in three tasks. The goals of the first two tasks are to classify whether a tweet contains mentions of adverse drug reactions (ADR) and extract these mentions, respectively. The objective of the third task is to build an end-to-end solution: first, detect ADR mentions and then map these entities to concepts in a controlled vocabulary. We investigate the use of a language representation model BERT trained to obtain semantic representations of social media texts. Our experiments on a dataset of user reviews showed that BERT is superior to state-of-the-art models based on recurrent neural networks. The BERT-based system for Task 1 obtained an F1 of 57.38%, with improvements up to +7.19% F1 over a score averaged across all 43 submissions. The ensemble of neural networks with a voting scheme for named entity recognition ranked first among 9 teams at the SMM4H 2019 Task 2 and obtained a relaxed F1 of 65.8%. The end-to-end model based on BERT for ADR normalization ranked first at the SMM4H 2019 Task 3 and obtained a relaxed F1 of 43.2%.

This paper presents our experimental work on exploring the potential of neural network models developed for aspect-based sentiment analysis for entity-level adverse drug reaction (ADR) classification. Our goal is to explore how to represent local context around ADR mentions and learn an entity representation, interacting with its context. We conducted extensive experiments on various sources of text-based information, including social media, electronic health records, and abstracts of scientific articles from PubMed. The results show that Interactive Attention Neural Network (IAN) outperformed other models on four corpora in terms of macro F-measure. This work is an abridged version of our recent paper accepted to Programming and Computer Software journal in 2019.

Detection of adverse drug reactions in postapproval periods is a crucial challenge for pharmacology. Social media and electronic clinical reports are becoming increasingly popular as a source for obtaining health related information. In this work, we focus on extraction information of adverse drug reactions from various sources of biomedical textbased information, including biomedical literature and social media. We formulate the problem as a binary classification task and compare the performance of four state-of-the-art attention-based neural networks in terms of the F-measure. We show the effectiveness of these methods on four different benchmarks.