Deep Learning for Social Media Health Text Classification

This paper describes the systems developed for 1st and 2nd tasks of the 3rd Social Media Mining for Health Applications Shared Task at EMNLP 2018. The first task focuses on automatic detection of posts mentioning a drug name or dietary supplement, a binary classification. The second task is about distinguishing the tweets that present personal medication intake, possible medication intake and non-intake. We performed extensive experiments with various classifiers like Logistic Regression, Random Forest, SVMs, Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) and deep learning architectures such as Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTM), jointed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and LSTM architecture, and attention based LSTM architecture both at word and character level. We have also explored using various pre-trained embeddings like Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe), Word2Vec and task-specific embeddings learned using CNN-LSTM and LSTMs.