Recognition of side effects as implicit-opinion words in drug reviews

Abstract

Purpose

Many opinion-mining systems and tools have been developed to provide users with the attitudes of people toward entities and their attributes or the overall polarities of documents. In addition, side effects are one of the critical measures used to evaluate a patient’s opinion for a particular drug. However, side effect recognition is a challenging task, since side effects coincide with disease symptoms lexically and syntactically. The purpose of this paper is to extract drug side effects from drug reviews as an integral implicit-opinion words.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes a detection algorithm to a medical-opinion-mining system using rule-based and support vector machines (SVM) algorithms. A corpus from 225 drug reviews was manually annotated by a medical expert for training and testing.

Findings

The results show that SVM significantly outperforms a rule-based algorithm. However, the results of both algorithms are encouraging and a good foundation for future research. Obviating the limitations and exploiting combined approaches would improve the results.

Practical implications

An automatic extraction for adverse drug effects information from online text can help regulatory authorities in rapid information screening and extraction instead of manual inspection and contributes to the acceleration of medical decision support and safety alert generation.

Originality/value

The results of this study can help database curators in compiling adverse drug effects databases and researchers to digest the huge amount of textual online information which is growing rapidly.

Citation

Ebrahimi, M., Yazdavar, A.H., Salim, N. and Eltyeb, S. (2016), "Recognition of side effects as implicit-opinion words in drug reviews", Online Information Review, Vol. 40 No. 7, pp. 1018-1032. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-06-2015-0208