A Distant Supervision Based Approach to Medical Persona Classification.

•We build a model to identify the medical persona associated with a social media post.•We use Convolutional Neural Networks for this task.•Our model achieves an improvement of 19.7% over the current state-of-the-art.•We use N-grams and salience analysis to discover salient sections of textual input.•We eliminate the need for manual labeling by using distant supervision based method.