Personal medication intake detection aims to automatically detect tweets that show clear evidence of personal medication consumption. It is a research topic that has attracted considerable attention to drug safety surveillance. This task is inevitably dependent on medical domain information, and the current main model for this task does not explicitly consider domain information. To tackle this problem, we propose a domain attention mechanism for recurrent neural networks, LSTMs, with a multi-level feature representation of Twitter data. Specifically, we utilize character-level CNN to capture morphological features at the word level. Subsequently, we feed them with word embeddings into a BiLSTM to get the hidden representation of a tweet. An attention mechanism is introduced over the hidden state of the BiLSTM to attend to special medical information. Finally, a classification is performed on the weighted hidden representation of tweets. Experiments over a publicly available benchmark dataset show that our model can exploit a domain attention mechanism to consider medical information to improve performance. For example, our approach achieves a precision score of 0.708, a recall score of 0.694, and a F1 score of 0.697, which is significantly outperforming multiple strong and relevant baselines.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.