Recognising drug names in unstructured English text with Python
We have open-sourced a Python library called Drug Named Entity Recognition for finding drug names in a string. For example, “i bought some phenoxymethylpenicillin”. This NLP task is called named entity recognition (finding drug names in text) and named entity linking (mapping drugs to IDs).
Please note Drug Named Entity Recognition finds only high confidence drugs. It also doesn’t find short code names of drugs, such as abbreviations commonly used in medicine, such as “Ceph” for “Cephradin” – as these are highly ambiguous.
Drug Named Entity Recognition also only finds the English names of these drugs. Names in the other languages are not supported.
You can install the Python library by typing in the command line:
pip install drug-named-entity-recognition