TLab at #SMM4H 2024: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for ADE Extraction and Normalization

AbstractSMM4H 2024 Task 1 is focused on the identification of standardized Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) in tweets. We introduce a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method, leveraging the capabilities of Llama 3, GPT-4, and the SFR-embedding-mistral model, along with few-shot prompting techniques, to map colloquial tweet language to MedDRA Preferred Terms (PTs) without relying on extensive training datasets. Our method achieved competitive performance, with an F1 score of 0.359 in the normalization task and 0.392 in the named entity recognition (NER) task. Notably, our model demonstrated robustness in identifying previously unseen MedDRA PTs (F1=0.363) greatly surpassing the median task score of 0.141 for such terms.