Medical Persona Classification in Social Media

Abstract

Identifying medical persona from a social media post is of paramount importance for drug marketing and pharmacovigilance. In this work, we propose multiple approaches to infer the medical persona associated with a social media post. We pose this as a supervised multi-label text classification problem. The main challenge is to identify the hidden cues in a post that are indicative of a particular persona. We first propose a large set of manually engineered features for this task. Further, we propose multiple neural network based architectures to extract useful features from these posts using pre-trained word embeddings. Our experiments on thousands of blogs and tweets show that the proposed approach results in 7% and 5% gain in F-measure over manual feature engineering based approach for blogs and tweets respectively.