Text mining for pharmacovigilance: Using machine learning for drug name recognition and drug-drug interaction extraction and classification.

Pharmacovigilance (PV) is defined by the World Health Organization as the science and activities related to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other drug-related problem. An essential aspect in PV is to acquire knowledge about Drug-Drug Interactions (DDIs). The shared tasks on DDI-Extraction organized in 2011 and 2013 have pointed out the importance of this issue and provided benchmarks for: Drug Name Recognition, DDI extraction and DDI classification. In this paper, we present our text mining systems for these tasks and evaluate their results on the DDI-Extraction benchmarks. Our systems rely on machine learning techniques using both feature-based and kernel-based methods. The obtained results for drug name recognition are encouraging. For DDI-Extraction, our hybrid system combining a feature-based method and a kernel-based method was ranked second in the DDI-Extraction-2011 challenge, and our two-step system for DDI detection and classification was ranked first in the DDI-Extraction-2013 task at SemEval. We discuss our methods and results and give pointers to future work.