Adith Iyer


2019

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Figurative Usage Detection of Symptom Words to Improve Personal Health Mention Detection
Adith Iyer | Aditya Joshi | Sarvnaz Karimi | Ross Sparks | Cecile Paris
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.