CLApr 16, 2025
Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class and Multi-Label Detection of Drug Use and Overdose Symptoms on Social MediaMuhammad Ahmad, Fida Ullah, Muhammad Usman et al.
Drug overdose remains a critical global health issue, often driven by misuse of opioids, painkillers, and psychiatric medications. Traditional research methods face limitations, whereas social media offers real-time insights into self-reported substance use and overdose symptoms. This study proposes an AI-driven NLP framework trained on annotated social media data to detect commonly used drugs and associated overdose symptoms. Using a hybrid annotation strategy with LLMs and human annotators, we applied traditional ML models, neural networks, and advanced transformer-based models. Our framework achieved 98% accuracy in multi-class and 97% in multi-label classification, outperforming baseline models by up to 8%. These findings highlight the potential of AI for supporting public health surveillance and personalized intervention strategies.
SIAug 12, 2025
SABIA: An AI-Powered Tool for Detecting Opioid-Related Behaviors on Social MediaMuhammad Ahmad, Fida Ullah, Muhammad Usman et al.
Social media platforms have become valuable tools for understanding public health challenges by offering insights into patient behaviors, medication use, and mental health issues. However, analyzing such data remains difficult due to the prevalence of informal language, slang, and coded communication, which can obscure the detection of opioid misuse. This study addresses the issue of opioid-related user behavior on social media, including informal expressions, slang terms, and misspelled or coded language. We analyzed the existing Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) technique and developed a BERT-BiLSTM-3CNN hybrid deep learning model, named SABIA, to create a single-task classifier that effectively captures the features of the target dataset. The SABIA model demonstrated strong capabilities in capturing semantics and contextual information. The proposed approach includes: (1) data preprocessing, (2) data representation using the SABIA model, (3) a fine-tuning phase, and (4) classification of user behavior into five categories. A new dataset was constructed from Reddit posts, identifying opioid user behaviors across five classes: Dealers, Active Opioid Users, Recovered Users, Prescription Users, and Non-Users, supported by detailed annotation guidelines. Experiments were conducted using supervised learning. Results show that SABIA achieved benchmark performance, outperforming the baseline (Logistic Regression, LR = 0.86) and improving accuracy by 9.30%. Comparisons with seven previous studies confirmed its effectiveness and robustness. This study demonstrates the potential of hybrid deep learning models for detecting complex opioid-related behaviors on social media, supporting public health monitoring and intervention efforts.
QMMay 28, 2025
Improving statistical learning methods via features selection without replacement sampling and random projectionSulaiman khan, Muhammad Ahmad, Fida Ullah et al.
Cancer is fundamentally a genetic disease characterized by genetic and epigenetic alterations that disrupt normal gene expression, leading to uncontrolled cell growth and metastasis. High-dimensional microarray datasets pose challenges for classification models due to the "small n, large p" problem, resulting in overfitting. This study makes three different key contributions: 1) we propose a machine learning-based approach integrating the Feature Selection Without Re-placement (FSWOR) technique and a projection method to improve classification accuracy. 2) We apply the Kendall statistical test to identify the most significant genes from the brain cancer mi-croarray dataset (GSE50161), reducing the feature space from 54,675 to 20,890 genes.3) we apply machine learning models using k-fold cross validation techniques in which our model incorpo-rates ensemble classifiers with LDA projection and Naïve Bayes, achieving a test score of 96%, outperforming existing methods by 9.09%. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our ap-proach in high-dimensional gene expression analysis, improving classification accuracy while mitigating overfitting. This study contributes to cancer biomarker discovery, offering a robust computational method for analyzing microarray data.
CLApr 25, 2025
EDU-NER-2025: Named Entity Recognition in Urdu Educational Texts using XLM-RoBERTa with X (formerly Twitter)Fida Ullah, Muhammad Ahmad, Muhammad Tayyab Zamir et al.
Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a pivotal role in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks by identifying and classifying named entities (NEs) from unstructured data into predefined categories such as person, organization, location, date, and time. While extensive research exists for high-resource languages and general domains, NER in Urdu particularly within domain-specific contexts like education remains significantly underexplored. This is Due to lack of annotated datasets for educational content which limits the ability of existing models to accurately identify entities such as academic roles, course names, and institutional terms, underscoring the urgent need for targeted resources in this domain. To the best of our knowledge, no dataset exists in the domain of the Urdu language for this purpose. To achieve this objective this study makes three key contributions. Firstly, we created a manually annotated dataset in the education domain, named EDU-NER-2025, which contains 13 unique most important entities related to education domain. Second, we describe our annotation process and guidelines in detail and discuss the challenges of labelling EDU-NER-2025 dataset. Third, we addressed and analyzed key linguistic challenges, such as morphological complexity and ambiguity, which are prevalent in formal Urdu texts.
CLMar 28, 2025
Opioid Named Entity Recognition (ONER-2025) from RedditMuhammad Ahmad, Rita Orji, Fida Ullah et al.
The opioid overdose epidemic remains a critical public health crisis, particularly in the United States, leading to significant mortality and societal costs. Social media platforms like Reddit provide vast amounts of unstructured data that offer insights into public perceptions, discussions, and experiences related to opioid use. This study leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP), specifically Opioid Named Entity Recognition (ONER-2025), to extract actionable information from these platforms. Our research makes four key contributions. First, we created a unique, manually annotated dataset sourced from Reddit, where users share self-reported experiences of opioid use via different administration routes. This dataset contains 331,285 tokens and includes eight major opioid entity categories. Second, we detail our annotation process and guidelines while discussing the challenges of labeling the ONER-2025 dataset. Third, we analyze key linguistic challenges, including slang, ambiguity, fragmented sentences, and emotionally charged language, in opioid discussions. Fourth, we propose a real-time monitoring system to process streaming data from social media, healthcare records, and emergency services to identify overdose events. Using 5-fold cross-validation in 11 experiments, our system integrates machine learning, deep learning, and transformer-based language models with advanced contextual embeddings to enhance understanding. Our transformer-based models (bert-base-NER and roberta-base) achieved 97% accuracy and F1-score, outperforming baselines by 10.23% (RF=0.88).