Performance Improvement of Drug Effects Extraction System from Japanese Blogs

Abstract

Abstract-Information disclosed to the public by patients is very important for people who are suffering from same illness because such information can be a source of knowledge and encouragement. Our aim is to make a system that extracts, organizes and visually represents information from patients' blogs. As the first step, the purpose of this paper is to extract descriptions of the effects caused by taking drugs as a triplet of expressions -drug name, object of change, and its effect -from illness survival blogs. However, conventional extraction methods are not suitable since these blogs are written in free natural language. Therefore, this paper proposes a method to extract the triplets using specific clue words and parsing the results. An evaluation experiment confirmed that medication usage information can be extracted with high accuracy using our proposed method, in comparison to existing methods. Moreover, recall was improved by combining our proposed method and a baseline system.

Blog Snippets Based Drug Effects Extraction System Using Lexical and Grammatical Restrictions

“…In the preliminary research, we found that the drug effects are written after specific nouns and verbs such as "side effects", "after" and "infection" (Kitajima et al, 2012. These imply that sentence contains information about using drugs.…”

“…In the preliminary research (Kitajima et al, 2012, the first author tagged triplets with 1,000 snippets which were randomly collected using "TOBYO-jiten". As a result, we found that 78.3% of the information on effects of drugs was described in the same sentence that contains the name of the drug.…”