Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a growing concern globally, necessitating enhanced understanding of the problem and its trends through data-driven research. Social media are unique and important sources of information about SUDs, particularly since the data in such sources are often generated by people with lived experiences. In this paper, we introduce Reddit-Impacts, a challenging Named Entity Recognition (NER) dataset curated from subreddits dedicated to discussions on prescription and illicit opioids, as well as medications for opioid use disorder. The dataset specifically concentrates on the lesser-studied, yet critically important, aspects of substance use--its clinical and social impacts. We collected data from chosen subreddits using the publicly available Application Programming Interface for Reddit. We manually annotated text spans representing clinical and social impacts reported by people who also reported personal nonmedical use of substances including but not limited to opioids, stimulants and benzodiazepines. Our objective is to create a resource that can enable the development of systems that can automatically detect clinical and social impacts of substance use from text-based social media data. The successful development of such systems may enable us to better understand how nonmedical use of substances affects individual health and societal dynamics, aiding the development of effective public health strategies. In addition to creating the annotated data set, we applied several machine learning models to establish baseline performances. Specifically, we experimented with transformer models like BERT, and RoBERTa, one few-shot learning model DANN by leveraging the full training dataset, and GPT-3.5 by using one-shot learning, for automatic NER of clinical and social impacts. The dataset has been made available through the 2024 SMM4H shared tasks.

In this paper, we present a customizable datacentric system that automatically generates common misspellings for complex health-related terms. The spelling variant generator relies on a dense vector model learned from large unlabeled text, which is used to find semantically close terms to the original/seed keyword, followed by the filtering of terms that are lexically dissimilar beyond a given threshold. The process is executed recursively, converging when no new terms similar (lexically and semantically) to the seed keyword are found. Weighting of intra-word character sequence similarities allows further problem-specific customization of the system. On a dataset prepared for this study, our system outperforms the current state-of-the-art for medication name variant generation with best F1-score of 0.69 and F1/4-score of 0.78. Extrinsic evaluation of the system on a set of cancer-related terms showed an increase of over 67% in retrieval rate from Twitter posts when the generated variants are included. Our proposed spelling variant generator has several advantages over the current state-of-the-art and other types of variant generators-(i) it is capable of filtering out lexically similar but semantically dissimilar terms, (ii) the number of variants generated is low as many low-frequency and ambiguous misspellings are filtered out, and (iii) the system is fully automatic, customizable and easily executable. While the base system is fully unsupervised, we show how supervision maybe employed to adjust weights for task-specific customization. The performance and significant relative simplicity of our proposed approach makes it a much needed misspelling generation resource for health-related text mining from noisy sources. The source code for the system has been made publicly available for research purposes.