A Corpus of Drug Usage Guidelines Annotated with Type of Advice

Adherence to drug usage guidelines for prescription and over-the-counter drugs is critical for drug safety and effectiveness of treatment. Drug usage guideline documents contain advice on potential drug-drug interaction, drug-food interaction, and drug administration process. Current research on drug safety and public health indicates patients are often either unaware of such critical advice or overlook them. Categorizing advice statements from these documents according to their topics can enable the patients to find safety critical information. However, automatically categorizing drug usage guidelines based on their topic is an open challenge and there is no annotated dataset on drug usage guidelines. To address the latter issue, this paper presents (i) an annotation scheme for annotating safety critical advice from drug usage guidelines, (ii) an annotation tool for such data, and (iii) an annotated dataset containing drug usage guidelines from 90 drugs. This work is expected to accelerate further release of annotated drug usage guideline datasets and research on automatically filtering safety critical information from these textual documents.