Applying Self-interaction Attention for Extracting Drug-Drug Interactions

Discovering the effect of the simultaneous assumption of drugs is a very important field in medical research that could improve the effectiveness of healthcare and avoid adverse drug reactions which can cause health problems to patients. Although there are several pharmacological databases containing information on drugs, this type of information is often expressed in the form of free text. Analyzing sentences in order to extract drug-drug interactions was the objective of the DDIExtraction-2013 task. Despite the fact that the challenge took place six years ago, the interest on this task is still active and several new methods based on Recurrent Neural Networks and Attention Mechanisms have been designed. In this paper, we propose a model that combines bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks with the Self-Interaction Attention Mechanism. Experimental analysis shows how this model improves the classification accuracy reducing the tendency to predict the majority class resulting in false negatives, over several input configurations.