Pretrained language models (PLMs) on domain-specific data have been proven to be effective for in-domain natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Our work aimed to develop a language model which can be effective for the NLP tasks with the data from diverse social media platforms. We pretrained a language model on Twitter and Reddit posts in English consisting of 929M sequence blocks for 112K steps. We benchmarked our model and 3 transformer-based models—BERT, BERTweet, and RoBERTa on 40 social media text classification tasks. The results showed that although our model did not perform the best on all of the tasks, it outperformed the baseline model—BERT on most of the tasks, which illustrates the effectiveness of our model. Also, our work provides some insights of how to improve the efficiency of training PLMs.

For the past seven years, the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) shared tasks have promoted the community-driven development and evaluation of advanced natural language processing systems to detect, extract, and normalize health-related information in public, user-generated content. This seventh iteration consists of ten tasks that include English and Spanish posts on Twitter, Reddit, and WebMD. Interest in the #SMM4H shared tasks continues to grow, with 117 teams that registered and 54 teams that participated in at least one task—a 17.5% and 35% increase in registration and participation, respectively, over the last iteration. This paper provides an overview of the tasks and participants’ systems. The data sets remain available upon request, and new systems can be evaluated through the post-evaluation phase on CodaLab.

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.

This paper describes our approach for six classification tasks (Tasks 1a, 3a, 3b, 4 and 5) and one span detection task (Task 1b) from the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2021 shared tasks. We developed two separate systems for classification and span detection, both based on pre-trained Transformer-based models. In addition, we applied oversampling and classifier ensembling in the classification tasks. The results of our submissions are over the median scores in all tasks except for Task 1a. Furthermore, our model achieved first place in Task 4 and obtained a 7% higher F1-score than the median in Task 1b.

This paper describes our approach for the automatic grading of evidence task from the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) Shared Task 2021. We developed two classification models with SVM and RoBERTa and applied an ensemble technique to combine the grades from different classifiers. Our results showed that the SVM model achieved comparable results to the RoBERTa model, and the ensemble system outperformed the individual models on this task. Our system achieved the first place among five teams and obtained 3.3% higher accuracy than the second place.

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.

Free text data from social media is now widely used in natural language processing research, and one of the most common machine learning tasks performed on this data is classification. Generally speaking, performances of supervised classification algorithms on social media datasets are lower than those on texts from other sources, but recently-proposed transformer-based models have considerably improved upon legacy state-of-the-art systems. Currently, there is no study that compares the performances of different variants of transformer-based models on a wide range of social media text classification datasets. In this paper, we benchmark the performances of transformer-based pre-trained models on 25 social media text classification datasets, 6 of which are health-related. We compare three pre-trained language models, RoBERTa-base, BERTweet and ClinicalBioBERT in terms of classification accuracy. Our experiments show that RoBERTa-base and BERTweet perform comparably on most datasets, and considerably better than ClinicalBioBERT, even on health-related datasets.

This paper describes the system developed by the Emory team for the WNUT-2020 Task 2: “Identifi- cation of Informative COVID-19 English Tweet”. Our system explores three recent Transformer- based deep learning models pretrained on large- scale data to encode documents. Moreover, we developed two feature enrichment methods to en- hance document embeddings by integrating emoji embeddings and syntactic features into deep learn- ing models. Our system achieved F1-score of 0.897 and accuracy of 90.1% on the test set, and ranked in the top-third of all 55 teams.

The number of users of social media continues to grow, with nearly half of adults worldwide and two-thirds of all American adults using social networking. Advances in automated data processing, machine learning and NLP present the possibility of utilizing this massive data source for biomedical and public health applications, if researchers address the methodological challenges unique to this media. We present the Social Media Mining for Health Shared Tasks collocated with the ACL at Florence in 2019, which address these challenges for health monitoring and surveillance, utilizing state of the art techniques for processing noisy, real-world, and substantially creative language expressions from social media users. For the fourth execution of this challenge, we proposed four different tasks. Task 1 asked participants to distinguish tweets reporting an adverse drug reaction (ADR) from those that do not. Task 2, a follow-up to Task 1, asked participants to identify the span of text in tweets reporting ADRs. Task 3 is an end-to-end task where the goal was to first detect tweets mentioning an ADR and then map the extracted colloquial mentions of ADRs in the tweets to their corresponding standard concept IDs in the MedDRA vocabulary. Finally, Task 4 asked participants to classify whether a tweet contains a personal mention of one’s health, a more general discussion of the health issue, or is an unrelated mention. A total of 34 teams from around the world registered and 19 teams from 12 countries submitted a system run. We summarize here the corpora for this challenge which are freely available at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/22521, and present an overview of the methods and the results of the competing systems.

The goals of the SMM4H shared tasks are to release annotated social media based health related datasets to the research community, and to compare the performances of natural language processing and machine learning systems on tasks involving these datasets. The third execution of the SMM4H shared tasks, co-hosted with EMNLP-2018, comprised of four subtasks. These subtasks involve annotated user posts from Twitter (tweets) and focus on the (i) automatic classification of tweets mentioning a drug name, (ii) automatic classification of tweets containing reports of first-person medication intake, (iii) automatic classification of tweets presenting self-reports of adverse drug reaction (ADR) detection, and (iv) automatic classification of vaccine behavior mentions in tweets. A total of 14 teams participated and 78 system runs were submitted (23 for task 1, 20 for task 2, 18 for task 3, 17 for task 4).

Social media sites (e.g., Twitter) have been used for surveillance of drug safety at the population level, but studies that focus on the effects of medications on specific sets of individuals have had to rely on other sources of data. Mining social media data for this in-formation would require the ability to distinguish indications of personal medication in-take in this media. Towards that end, this paper presents an annotated corpus that can be used to train machine learning systems to determine whether a tweet that mentions a medication indicates that the individual posting has taken that medication at a specific time. To demonstrate the utility of the corpus as a training set, we present baseline results of supervised classification.

We present a simple supervised text classification system that combines sparse and dense vector representations of words, and generalized representations of words via clusters. The sparse vectors are generated from word n-gram sequences (1-3). The dense vector representations of words (embeddings) are learned by training a neural network to predict neighboring words in a large unlabeled dataset. To classify a text segment, the different representations of it are concatenated, and the classification is performed using Support Vector Machines (SVM). Our system is particularly intended for use by non-experts of natural language processing and machine learning, and, therefore, the system does not require any manual tuning of parameters or weights. Given a training set, the system automatically generates the training vectors, optimizes the relevant hyper-parameters for the SVM classifier, and trains the classification model. We evaluated this system on the SemEval-2017 English sentiment analysis task. In terms of average F1-score, our system obtained 8th position out of 39 submissions (F1-score: 0.632, average recall: 0.637, accuracy: 0.646).

Social media has emerged into a crucial resource for obtaining population-based signals for various public health monitoring and surveillance tasks, such as pharmacovigilance. There is an abundance of knowledge hidden within social media data, and the volume is growing. Drug-related chatter on social media can include user-generated information that can provide insights into public health problems such as abuse, adverse reactions, long-term effects, and multi-drug interactions. Our objective in this paper is to present to the biomedical natural language processing, data science, and public health communities data sets (annotated and unannotated), tools and resources that we have collected and created from social media. The data we present was collected from Twitter using the generic and brand names of drugs as keywords, along with their common misspellings. Following the collection of the data, annotation guidelines were created over several iterations, which detail important aspects of social media data annotation and can be used by future researchers for developing similar data sets. The annotation guidelines were followed to prepare data sets for text classification, information extraction and normalization. In this paper, we discuss the preparation of these guidelines, outline the data sets prepared, and present an overview of our state-of-the-art systems for data collection, supervised classification, and information extraction. In addition to the development of supervised systems for classification and extraction, we developed and released unlabeled data and language models. We discuss the potential uses of these language models in data mining and the large volumes of unlabeled data from which they were generated. We believe that the summaries and repositories we present here of our data, annotation guidelines, models, and tools will be beneficial to the research community as a single-point entry for all these resources, and will promote further research in this area.