This paper presents our findings from participating in the SMM4H Shared Task 2021. We addressed Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Text Classification. To address NER we explored BiLSTM-CRF with Stacked Heterogeneous embeddings and linguistic features. We investigated various machine learning algorithms (logistic regression, SVM and Neural Networks) to address text classification. Our proposed approaches can be generalized to different languages and we have shown its effectiveness for English and Spanish. Our text classification submissions have achieved competitive performance with F1-score of 0.46 and 0.90 on ADE Classification (Task 1a) and Profession Classification (Task 7a) respectively. In the case of NER, our submissions scored F1-score of 0.50 and 0.82 on ADE Span Detection (Task 1b) and Profession span detection (Task 7b) respectively.

The state of art natural language processing systems relies on sizable training datasets to achieve high performance. Lack of such datasets in the specialized low resource domains lead to suboptimal performance. In this work, we adapt backtranslation to generate high quality and linguistically diverse synthetic data for low-resource named entity recognition. We perform experiments on two datasets from the materials science (MaSciP) and biomedical (S800) domains. The empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed augmentation strategy, particularly in the low-resource scenario.