Extraction of drug–drug interaction using neural embedding

Abstract

Information on changes in a drug’s effect when taken in combination with a second drug, known as drug–drug interaction (DDI), is relevant in the pharmaceutical industry. DDIs can delay, decrease, or enhance absorption of either drug and thus decrease or increase their action or cause adverse effects. Information Extraction (IE) can be of great benefit in allowing identification and extraction of relevant information on DDIs. We here propose an approach for the extraction of DDI from text using neural word embedding to train a machine learning system. Results show that our system is competitive against other systems for the task of extracting DDIs, and that significant improvements can be achieved by learning from word features and using a deep-learning approach. Our study demonstrates that machine learning techniques such as neural networks and deep learning methods can efficiently aid in IE from text. Our proposed approach is well suited to play a significant role in future research.