Identification of Consumer Adverse Drug Reaction Messages on Social Media

The prevalence of social media has resulted in spikes of data on the Internet which can have potential use to assist in many aspects of human life. One prospective use of the data is in the development of an early warning system to monitor consumer Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs). The direct reporting of ADRs by consumers is playing an increasingly important role in the world of pharmacovigilance. Social media provides patients a platform to exchange their experiences regarding the use of certain drugs. However, the messages posted on those social media networks contain both ADR related messages (positive examples) and non-ADR related messages (negative examples). In this paper, we integrate text mining and partially supervised learning methods to automatically extract and classify messages posted on social media networks into positive and negative examples. Our findings can provide managerial insights into how social media analytics can improve not only postmarketing surveillance, but also other problem domains where large quantity of user-generated content is available.