An Opinion Mining Approach for Drug Reviews in Spanish

Abstract

In recent years, the application of opinion mining has increased as a boom and growth of social media and blogs on the web, and these sources generate a large volume of unstructured data; therefore, a manual review is not feasible. For this reason, it has become necessary to apply web scraping and opinion mining techniques, two primary processes that help to obtain and summarize the data. Opinion mining, among its various areas of application, stands out for its essential contribution in the context of healthcare, especially for pharmacovigilance, because it allows finding adverse drug events omitted by the pharmaceutical companies. This chapter proposes a hybrid approach that uses semantics and machine learning for an opinion mining-analysis system by applying natural-language-processing techniques for the detection of drug polarity for chronic-degenerative diseases, available in blogs and specialized websites in the Spanish language.