Automatic Extraction of Medication Mentions from Tweets-Overview of the BioCreative VII Shared Task 3 Competition.

This study presents the outcomes of the shared task competition BioCreative VII (Task 3) focusing on the extraction of medication names from a Twitter user's publicly available tweets (the user's 'timeline'). In general, detecting health-related tweets is notoriously challenging for natural language processing tools. The main challenge, aside from the informality of the language used, is that people tweet about any and all topics, and most of their tweets are not related to health. Thus, finding those tweets in a user's timeline that mention specific health-related concepts such as medications requires addressing extreme imbalance. Task 3 called for detecting tweets in a user's timeline that mentions a medication name and, for each detected mention, extracting its span. The organizers made available a corpus consisting of 182 049 tweets publicly posted by 212 Twitter users with all medication mentions manually annotated. The corpus exhibits the natural distribution of positive tweets, with only 442 tweets (0.2%) mentioning a medication. This task was an opportunity for participants to evaluate methods that are robust to class imbalance beyond the simple lexical match. A total of 65 teams registered, and 16 teams submitted a system run. This study summarizes the corpus created by the organizers and the approaches taken by the participating teams for this challenge. The corpus is freely available at https://biocreative.bioinformatics.udel.edu/tasks/biocreative-vii/track-3/. The methods and the results of the competing systems are analyzed with a focus on the approaches taken for learning from class-imbalanced data.

Connected-Health Algorithm: Development and Evaluation.

Nowadays, there is a growing interest towards the adoption of novel ICT technologies in the field of medical monitoring and personal health care systems. This paper proposes design of a connected health algorithm inspired from social computing paradigm. The purpose of the algorithm is to give a recommendation for performing a specific activity that will improve user's health, based on his health condition and set of knowledge derived from the history of the user and users with similar attitudes to him. The algorithm could help users to have bigger confidence in choosing their physical activities that will improve their health. The proposed algorithm has been experimentally validated using real data collected from a community of 1000 active users. The results showed that the recommended physical activity, contributed towards weight loss of at least 0.5 kg, is found in the first half of the ordered list of recommendations, generated by the algorithm, with the probability > 0.6 with 1 % level of significance.