Extracting Information about Medication Use from Veterinary Discussions

Our research aims to extract information about medication use from veterinary discussion forums. We introduce the task of categorizing information about medication use to determine whether a doctor has prescribed medication, changed protocols, observed effects, or stopped use of a medication. First, we create a medication detector for informal veterinary texts and show that features derived from the Web can be very powerful. Second, we create classifiers to categorize each medication mention with respect to six categories. We demonstrate that this task benefits from a rich linguistic feature set, domain-specific semantic features produced by a weakly supervised semantic tagger, and balanced self-training.