Adversarial neural network with sentiment-aware attention for detecting adverse drug reactions

Adverse drug reaction (ADR) detection is an important issue in drug safety. ADRs are health threats caused by medication. Identifying ADRs in a timely manner can reduce harm to patients and can also assist doctors in the rational use of drugs. Many studies have investigated potential ADRs based on social media due to the openness and timeliness of this resource; however, they have ignored the fine-grained emotional expression in social media text. In addition, the benchmark datasets from social media are usually small, which can result in the problem of over-fitting. In this paper, we propose the Adversarial Neural Network with Sentiment-aware Attention (ANNSA) model, which enhances the sentimental element in social media and improves the performance of neural networks via data augmentation. Specifically, a sentiment-aware attention mechanism is proposed to extract the word-level sentiment features associated with sentiment words and learn task-related information by optimizing a task-specific loss. For low-resource datasets, we use an adversarial training approach to generate perturbations of the word embeddings via an implicit regularization technique. ANNSA was tested on three social media ADR detection datasets, namely, Twitter, TwiMed (Twitter) and CADEC. The experimental results indicated the ability to achieve F1 values of 48.84%, 64.18% and 83.06%, respectively, comparable to the best results reported for state-of-the-art methods. Our study demonstrates that sentiment words are highly correlated with ADRs and that word-level sentiment features can assist in detecting ADRs from social media datasets.