# Multi-Task Learning for Extraction of Adverse Drug Reaction Mentions from Tweets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05130 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05130/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [An analysis of full-size Russian complexly NER labelled corpus of Internet user reviews on the drugs based on deep learning and language neural nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00059/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are one of the leading causes of mortality in health care. Current ADR surveillance systems are often associated with a substantial time lag before such events are officially published. On the other hand, online social media such as Twitter contain information about ADR events in real-time, much before any official reporting. Current state-of-the-art in ADR mention extraction uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), which typically need large labeled corpora. Towards this end, we propose a multi-task learning based method which can utilize a similar auxiliary task (adverse drug event detection) to enhance the performance of the main task, i.e., ADR extraction. Furthermore, in the absence of auxiliary task dataset, we propose a novel joint multi-task learning method to automatically generate weak supervision dataset for the auxiliary task when a large pool of unlabeled tweets is available. Experiments with 0.48M tweets show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for the ADR mention extraction task by 7.2% in terms of F1 score.