OCHADAI at SMM4H-2021 Task 5: Classifying self-reporting tweets on potential cases of COVID-19 by ensembling pre-trained language models

Abstract

Since the outbreak of coronavirus at the end of 2019, there have been numerous studies on coro- navirus in the NLP arena. Meanwhile, Twitter has been a valuable source of news and a pub- lic medium for the conveyance of information and personal expression. This paper describes the system developed by the Ochadai team for the Social Media Mining for Health Appli- cations (SMM4H) 2021 Task 5, which aims to automatically distinguish English tweets that self-report potential cases of COVID-19 from those that do not. We proposed a model ensemble that leverages pre-trained represen- tations from COVID-Twitter-BERT (Müller et al., 2020), RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019), and Twitter-RoBERTa (Glazkova et al., 2021). Our model obtained F1-scores of 76% on the test set in the evaluation phase, and 77.5% in the post-evaluation phase.