KFU NLP Team at SMM4H 2019 Tasks: Want to Extract Adverse Drugs Reactions from Tweets? BERT to The Rescue

This paper describes a system developed for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2019 shared tasks. Specifically, we participated in three tasks. The goals of the first two tasks are to classify whether a tweet contains mentions of adverse drug reactions (ADR) and extract these mentions, respectively. The objective of the third task is to build an end-to-end solution: first, detect ADR mentions and then map these entities to concepts in a controlled vocabulary. We investigate the use of a language representation model BERT trained to obtain semantic representations of social media texts. Our experiments on a dataset of user reviews showed that BERT is superior to state-of-the-art models based on recurrent neural networks. The BERT-based system for Task 1 obtained an F1 of 57.38%, with improvements up to +7.19% F1 over a score averaged across all 43 submissions. The ensemble of neural networks with a voting scheme for named entity recognition ranked first among 9 teams at the SMM4H 2019 Task 2 and obtained a relaxed F1 of 65.8%. The end-to-end model based on BERT for ADR normalization ranked first at the SMM4H 2019 Task 3 and obtained a relaxed F1 of 43.2%.