Explorers at #SMM4H 2023: Enhancing BERT for Health Applications through Knowledge and Model Fusion

Abstract: An increasing number of individuals are willing to post states and opinions in social media, which has become a valuable data resource for studying human health. Furthermore, social media has been a crucial research point for healthcare now. This paper outlines the methods in our participation in the #SMM4H 2023 Shared Tasks, including data preprocessing, continual pre-training and fine-tuned optimization strategies. Especially for the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task, we utilize the model architecture named W2NER that effectively enhances the model generalization ability. Our method achieved first place in the Task 3. This paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for presentation at the #SMM4H 2023 Workshop.