title: Pharmacovigilance on twitter? Mining tweets for adverse drug reactions.
abstract: Recent research has shown that Twitter data analytics can have broad implications on public health research. However, its value for pharmacovigilance has been scantly studied - with health related forums and community support groups preferred for the task. We present a systematic study of tweets collected for 74 drugs to assess their value as sources of potential signals for adverse drug reactions (ADRs). We created an annotated corpus of 10,822 tweets. Each tweet was annotated for the presence or absence of ADR mentions, with the span and Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concept ID noted for each ADR present. Using Cohen's kappa1, we calculated the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) for the binary annotations to be 0.69. To demonstrate the utility of the corpus, we attempted a lexicon-based approach for concept extraction, with promising success (54.1% precision, 62.1% recall, and 57.8% F-measure). A subset of the corpus is freely available at: http://diego.asu.edu/downloads.
authors.affiliation: Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.
authors.forename: Karen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: O'Connor
authors.affiliation: Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.
authors.forename: Pranoti
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Pimpalkhute
authors.affiliation: Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.
authors.forename: Azadeh
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nikfarjam
authors.affiliation: Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ginn
authors.affiliation: Regis University, Denver, CO.
authors.forename: Karen L
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.
authors.forename: Graciela
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Gonzalez
mesh_terms: D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D064420:Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D060735:Pharmacovigilance; D055553:Prescription Drugs / Q000009:adverse effects
chemical_list: D055553:Prescription Drugs