An Explainable Approach of Inferring Potential Medication Effects from Social Media Data

Abstract

Understanding medication effects is an important activity in pharmacovigilance in which patients are the most important contributor. Social media, where users share their personal experiences of medication effects, have been recommended as an alternative data source of gathering signal information of suspected medication effects. To discover potential medication-effect relations from Twitter data, we devised a method employing analogical reasoning with neural embedding of Twitter text. The process involves learning the neural embedding from unlabeled tweets and performing vector arithmetic, making it obscure to understand how an inferred relation is derived. To make the process understandable and interpretable and to facilitate the decision making on accepting or rejecting any inferred medication-effect relations, we added explanation(s) to each step of the process. An example of inferred relation is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in explaining how the result of each step is derived.