An Assessment of Mentions of Adverse Drug Events on Social Media With Natural Language Processing: Model Development and Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Adverse reactions to drugs attract significant concern in both clinical practice and public health monitoring. Multiple measures have been put into place to increase postmarketing surveillance of the adverse effects of drugs and to improve drug safety. These measures include implementing spontaneous reporting systems and developing automated natural language processing systems based on data from electronic health records and social media to collect evidence of adverse drug events that can be further investigated as possible adverse reactions. OBJECTIVE: While using social media for collecting evidence of adverse drug events has potential, it is not clear whether social media are a reliable source for this information. Our work aims to (1) develop natural language processing approaches to identify adverse drug events on social media and (2) assess the reliability of social media data to identify adverse drug events. METHODS: We propose a collocated long short-term memory network model with attentive pooling and aggregated, contextual representation generated by a pretrained model. We applied this model on large-scale Twitter data to identify adverse drug event-related tweets. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of these tweets to validate the reliability of social media data as a means to collect such information. RESULTS: The model outperformed a variant without contextual representation during both the validation and evaluation phases. Through the content analysis of adverse drug event tweets, we observed that adverse drug event-related discussions had 7 themes. Mental health-related, sleep-related, and pain-related adverse drug event discussions were most frequent. We also contrast known adverse drug reactions to those mentioned in tweets. CONCLUSIONS: We observed a distinct improvement in the model when it used contextual information. However, our results reveal weak generalizability of the current systems to unseen data. Additional research is needed to fully utilize social media data and improve the robustness and reliability of natural language processing systems. The content analysis, on the other hand, showed that Twitter covered a sufficiently wide range of adverse drug events, as well as known adverse reactions, for the drugs mentioned in tweets. Our work demonstrates that social media can be a reliable data source for collecting adverse drug event mentions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".