Detecting Personal Medication Intake in Twitter: An Annotated Corpus and Baseline Classification System

Abstract

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.