Incorporating Emotions into Health Mention Classification Task on Social Media

The health mention classification (HMC) task is the process of identifying and classifying mentions of health-related concepts in text. This can be useful for identifying and tracking the spread of diseases through social media posts. However, this is a non-trivial task. Here we build on recent studies suggesting that using emotional information may improve upon this task. Our study results in a framework for health mention classification that incorporates affective features. We present two methods, an intermediate task fine-tuning approach (implicit) and a multi-feature fusion approach (explicit) to incorporate emotions into our target task of HMC. We evaluated our approach on 5 HMC-related datasets from different social media platforms including three from Twitter, one from Reddit and another from a combination of social media sources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach results in statistically significant performance gains on HMC tasks. By using the multi-feature fusion approach, we achieve at least a 3% improvement in F1 score over BERT baselines across all datasets. We also show that considering only negative emotions does not significantly affect performance on the HMC task. Additionally, our results indicate that HMC models infused with emotional knowledge are an effective alternative, especially when other HMC datasets are unavailable for domain-specific fine-tuning. The source code for our models is freely available at https://github.com/tahirlanre/Emotion_PHM.