Analysis of Tweets for Social Media Health Applications

Social networking sites like Twitter have provided people a platform to connect

with each other, to discuss and share information and news or to entertain themselves. As the number of users continues to grow there has been explosive growth in the data generated by these users. Such a vast data source has provided researchers a way to study and monitor public health.

Accurately analyzing tweets is a difficult task mainly because of their short length, the inventive spellings and creative language expressions. Instead of focusing at the topic level, identifying tweets that have personal health experience mentions would be more helpful to researchers, governments and other organizations. Another important limitation in the current systems for social media health applications is the use of a disease-specific model and dataset to study a particular disease. Identifying adverse drug reactions is an important part of the drug development process. Detecting and extracting adverse drug mentions in tweets can supplement the list of adverse drug reactions that result from the drug trials and can help in the improvement of the drugs.

This thesis aims to address these two challenges and proposes three systems. A generalizable system to identify personal health experience mentions across different disease domains, a system for automatic classifications of adverse effects mentions in tweets and a system to extract adverse drug mentions from tweets. The proposed systems use the transfer learning from language models to achieve notable scores on Social Media Mining for Health Applications(SMM4H) 2019 (Weissenbacher et al. 2019) shared tasks.