Concept Identification and Normalisation for Adverse Drug Event Discovery in Medical Forums

Social media is becoming an increasingly important source of information to complement traditional pharmacovigilance methods. In order to identify signals of potential adverse drug reactions, it is necessary to first identify medical concepts and drugs in the text. We evaluate different concept extraction techniques on medical forums and for the machine learning approaches we encode complex annotations using a scheme that showed good results in other domains. Our study shows that the extended encoding scheme, although imperfect, still produces good results despite the complexities of social media. The comparison of techniques shows that the machine learning approach significantly outperforms the other approaches.