Approaching SMM4H 2020 with Ensembles of BERT Flavours

AbstractThis paper describes our solutions submitted to the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) Shared Task 2020. We participated in the following tasks: Task 1 aimed at classifying if a tweet reports medications or not, Task 2 (only for the English dataset) aimed at discriminating if a tweet mentions adverse effects or not, and Task 5 aimed at recognizing if a tweet mentions birth defects or not. Our work focused on studying different neural network architectures based on various flavors of bidirectional Transformers (i.e., BERT), in the context of the previously mentioned classification tasks. For Task 1, we achieved an F1-score (70.5%) above the mean performance of the best scores made by all teams, whereas for Task 2, we obtained an F1-score of 37%. Also, we achieved a micro-averaged F1-score of 62% for Task 5.