Annotation of Adverse Drug Reactions in Patients' Weblogs

Adverse drug reactions are a severe problem that significantly degrade quality of life, or even threaten the life of patients. Patient-generated texts available on the web have been gaining attention as a promising source of information in this regard. While previous studies annotated such patient-generated content, they only reported on limited information, such as whether a text described an adverse drug reaction or not. Further, they only annotated short texts of a few sentences crawled from online forums and social networking services. The dataset we present in this paper is unique for the richness of annotated information, including detailed descriptions of drug reactions with full context. We crawled patient{'}s weblog articles shared on an online patient-networking platform and annotated the effects of drugs therein reported. We identified spans describing drug reactions and assigned labels for related drug names, standard codes for the symptoms of the reactions, and types of effects. As a first dataset, we annotated 677 drug reactions with these detailed labels based on 169 weblog articles by Japanese lung cancer patients. Our annotation dataset is made publicly available at our web site (https://yukiar.github.io/adr-jp/) for further research on the detection of adverse drug reactions and more broadly, on patient-generated text processing.