ADEQA: A Question Answer based approach for joint ADE-Suspect Extraction using Sequence-To-Sequence Transformers

Early identification of Adverse Drug Events (ADE) is critical for taking prompt actions while introducing new drugs into the market. These ADEs information are available through various unstructured data sources like clinical study reports, patient health records, social media posts, etc. Extracting ADEs and the related suspect drugs using machine learning is a challenging task due to the complex linguistic relations between drug ADE pairs in textual data and unavailability of large corpus of labelled datasets. This paper introduces ADEQA, a question-answer(QA) based approach using quasi supervised labelled data and sequence-to-sequence transformers to extract ADEs, drug suspects and the relationships between them. Unlike traditional QA models, natural language generation (NLG) based models don't require extensive token level labelling and thereby reduces the adoption barrier significantly. On a public ADE corpus, we were able to achieve state-of-the-art results with an F1 score of 94% on establishing the relationships between ADEs and the respective suspects.

Using Gaussian Measures for Efficient Constraint Based Clustering

In this paper we present a novel iterative multiphase clustering technique for efficiently clustering high dimensional data points. For this purpose we implement clustering feature (CF) tree on a real data set and a Gaussian density distribution constraint on the resultant CF tree. The post processing by the application of Gaussian density distribution function on the micro-clusters leads to refinement of the previously formed clusters thus improving their quality. This algorithm also succeeds in overcoming the inherent drawbacks of conventional hierarchical methods of clustering like inability to undo the change made to the dendogram of the data points. Moreover, the constraint measure applied in the algorithm makes this clustering technique suitable for need driven data analysis. We provide veracity of our claim by evaluating our algorithm with other similar clustering algorithms. Introduction