Figurative Usage Detection of Symptom Words to Improve Personal Health Mention Detection
Adith Iyer, Aditya Joshi, Sarvnaz Karimi, Ross Stewart Sparks, Cécile L. Paris · 2019
Personal health mention detection deals with predicting whether or not a given sentence is a report of a health condition.Past work mentions errors in this prediction when symptom words, i.e., names of symptoms of interest, are used in a figurative sense.Therefore, we combine a state-of-the-art figurative usage detection with CNN-based personal health mention detection.To do so, we present two methods: a pipeline-based approach and a feature augmentation-based approach.The introduction of figurative usage detection results in an average improvement of 2.21% F-score of personal health mention detection, in the case of the feature augmentation-based approach.This paper demonstrates the promise of using figurative usage detection to improve personal health mention detection.