Multimodal model with text and drug embeddings for adverse drug reaction classification

In this paper, we focus on the classification of tweets as sources of potential signals for adverse drug effects (ADEs) or drug reactions (ADRs). Following the intuition that text and drug structure representations are complementary, we introduce a multimodal model with two components. These components are state-of-the-art BERT-based models for language understanding and molecular property prediction. Experiments were carried out on multilingual benchmarks of the Social Media Mining for Health Research and Applications (#SMM4H) initiative. Our models obtained state-of-the-art results of 0.61 F1-measure and 0.57 F1-measure on #SMM4H 2021 Shared Tasks 1a and 2 in English and Russian, respectively. On the classification of French tweets from SMM4H 2020 Task 1, our approach pushes the state of the art by an absolute gain of 8% F1. Our experiments show that the molecular information obtained from neural networks is more beneficial for ADE classification than traditional molecular descriptors. The source code for our models is freely available at https://github.com/Andoree/smm4h_2021_classification.