Annotation and detection of drug effects in text for pharmacovigilance.

Pharmacovigilance (PV) databases record the benefits and risks of different drugs, as a means to ensure their safe and effective use. Creating and maintaining such resources can be complex, since a particular medication may have divergent effects in different individuals, due to specific patient characteristics and/or interactions with other drugs being administered. Textual information from various sources can provide important evidence to curators of PV databases about the usage and effects of drug targets in different medical subjects.