RACAI@SMM4H'22: Tweets Disease Mention Detection Using a Neural Lateral Inhibitory Mechanism.

This paper presents our system employed for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 competition Task 10 - SocialDisNER. The goal of the task was to improve the detection of diseases in tweets. Because the tweets were in Spanish, we approached this problem using a system that relies on a pre-trained multilingual model and is fine-tuned using the recently introduced lateral inhibition layer. We further experimented on this task by employing a conditional random field on top of the system and using a voting-based ensemble that contains various architectures. The evaluation results outlined that our best performing model obtained 83.7% F1-strict on the validation set and 82.1% F1-strict on the test set.