Using weak supervision to generate training datasets from social media data: a proof of concept to identify drug mentions

Twitter has been a remarkable resource for research in pharmacovigilance in the last decade. Traditionally, rule- or lexicon-based methods have been utilized for automatically extracting drug tweets for human annotation. The process of human annotation to create labeled sets for machine learning models is laborious, time consuming and not scalable. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of applying weak supervision (noisy labeling) to select drug data, and build machine learning models using large amounts of noisy labeled data instead of limited gold standard labelled sets. Our results demonstrate the models built with large amounts of noisy data achieve similar performance than models trained on limited gold standard datasets, hence demonstrating that weak supervision helps reduce the need to rely on manual annotation, allowing more data to be easily labeled and useful for downstream machine learning applications, in this case drug mention identification.