Following the global COVID-19 pandemic, the number of scientific papers studying the virus has grown massively, leading to increased interest in automated literate review. We present a clinical text mining system that improves on previous efforts in three ways. First, it can recognize over 100 different entity types including social determinants of health, anatomy, risk factors, and adverse events in addition to other commonly used clinical and biomedical entities. Second, the text processing pipeline includes assertion status detection, to distinguish between clinical facts that are present, absent, conditional, or about someone other than the patient. Third, the deep learning models used are more accurate than previously available, leveraging an integrated pipeline of state-of-the-art pretrained named entity recognition models, and improving on the previous best performing benchmarks for assertion status detection. We illustrate extracting trends and insights, e.g. most frequent disorders and symptoms, and most common vital signs and EKG findings, from the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). The system is built using the Spark NLP library which natively supports scaling to use distributed clusters, leveraging GPUs, configurable and reusable NLP pipelines, healthcare specific embeddings, and the ability to train models to support new entity types or human languages with no code changes.
National Center for Biotechnology Information（国家生物技术信息中心）；National Library of Medicine（国家医学图书馆）；National Institutes of Health（国立卫生研究院）
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on society, both because of the serious health effects of COVID-19 and because of public health measures implemented to slow its spread. Many of these difficulties are fundamentally information needs; attempts to address these needs have caused an information overload for both researchers and the public. Natural language processing (NLP), the branch of artificial intelligence that interprets human language, can be applied to address many of the information needs made urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic. This review surveys approximately 150 NLP st…
Mayo Clinic（妙佑医疗国际）；Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute（塔夫茨临床与转化科学研究所）；Tufts Medical Center（塔夫茨医疗中心）；University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）；University of Kansas Medical Center（堪萨斯大学医学中心）；University of Minnesota at Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；University of Alabama at Birmingham（阿拉巴马大学伯明翰分校）；University of Michigan Medical School（密歇根大学医学院）；Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center（维克森林浸信会医疗中心）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Sage Bionetwork（Sage生物网络）
While we pay attention to the latest advances in clinical natural language processing (NLP), we can notice some resistance in the clinical and translational research community to adopt NLP models due to limited transparency, interpretability, and usability. In this study, we proposed an open natural language processing development framework. We evaluated it through the implementation of NLP algorithms for the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). Based on the interests in information extraction from COVID-19 related clinical notes, our work includes 1) an open data annotation process usin…
Spark NLP is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) library built on top of Apache Spark ML. It provides simple, performant and accurate NLP annotations for machine learning pipelines that can scale easily in a distributed environment. Spark NLP comes with 1100 pre trained pipelines and models in more than 192 languages. It supports nearly all the NLP tasks and modules that can be used seamlessly in a cluster. Downloaded more than 2.7 million times and experiencing nine times growth since January 2020, Spark NLP is used by 54% of healthcare organizations as the worlds most widely used NLP library…
The rapidly evolving literature of COVID-19 related articles makes it challenging for NLP models to be effectively trained for information retrieval and extraction with the corresponding labeled data that follows the current distribution of the pandemic. On the other hand, due to the uncertainty of the situation, human experts' supervision would always be required to double check the decision making of these models highlighting the importance of interpretability. In the light of these challenges, this study proposes an interpretable self-supervised multi-task learning model to jointly and effe…
The current COVID-19 pandemic has lead to the creation of many corpora that facilitate NLP research and downstream applications to help fight the pandemic. However, most of these corpora are exclusively for English. As the pandemic is a global problem, it is worth creating COVID-19 related datasets for languages other than English. In this paper, we present the first manually-annotated COVID-19 domain-specific dataset for Vietnamese. Particularly, our dataset is annotated for the named entity recognition (NER) task with newly-defined entity types that can be used in other future epidemics. Our…
The rise of big data analytics on top of NLP increases the computational burden for text processing at scale. The problems faced in NLP are very high dimensional text, so it takes a high computation resource. The MapReduce allows parallelization of large computations and can improve the efficiency of text processing. This research aims to study the effect of big data processing on NLP tasks based on a deep learning approach. We classify a big text of news topics with fine-tuning BERT used pre-trained models. Five pre-trained models with a different number of parameters were used in this study.…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）；Jiangsu University of Science and Technology（江苏科技大学）
Internet forums and public social media, such as online healthcare forums, provide a convenient channel for users (people/patients) concerned about health issues to discuss and share information with each other. In late December 2019, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus (infection from which results in the disease named COVID-19) was reported, and, due to the rapid spread of the virus in other parts of the world, the World Health Organization declared a state of emergency. In this paper, we used automated extraction of COVID-19 related discussions from social media and a natural language proces…
Can Modern NLP Systems Reliably Annotate Chest Radiography Exams? A Pre-Purchase Evaluation and Comparative Study of Solutions from AWS, Google, Azure, John Snow Labs, and Open-Source Models on an Independent Pediatric Dataset
Named entity recognition (NER) is a widely applicable natural language processing task and building block of question answering, topic modeling, information retrieval, etc. In the medical domain, NER plays a crucial role by extracting meaningful chunks from clinical notes and reports, which are then fed to downstream tasks like assertion status detection, entity resolution, relation extraction, and de-identification. Reimplementing a Bi-LSTM-CNN-Char deep learning architecture on top of Apache Spark, we present a single trainable NER model that obtains new state-of-the-art results on seven pub…
Academic case reports lack diversity: Assessing the presence and diversity of sociodemographic and behavioral factors related to Post COVID-19 Condition
Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto（多伦多大学达拉纳公共卫生学院）；York University（约克大学）；Vector Institute（矢量研究院）；Public Health Ontario（安大略省公共卫生局）
Melax Technologies, Inc（Melax科技）；University of Kansas Medical Center（堪萨斯大学医学中心）；Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学医学院）；The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston（德克萨斯大学休斯顿健康科学中心）；University of Missouri School of Medicine（密苏里大学医学院）
The COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world rapidly, infecting millions of people. An efficient tool that can accurately recognize important clinical concepts of COVID-19 from free text in electronic health records (EHRs) will be valuable to accelerate COVID-19 clinical research. To this end, this study aims at adapting the existing CLAMP natural language processing tool to quickly build COVID-19 SignSym, which can extract COVID-19 signs/symptoms and their 8 attributes (body location, severity, temporal expression, subject, condition, uncertainty, negation, and course) from clinical text. The…
Understanding who blames or supports whom in news text is a critical research question in computational social science. Traditional methods and datasets for sentiment analysis are, however, not suitable for the domain of political text as they do not consider the direction of sentiments expressed between entities. In this paper, we propose a novel NLP task of identifying directed sentiment relationship between political entities from a given news document, which we call directed sentiment extraction. From a million-scale news corpus, we construct a dataset of news sentences where sentiment rel…
Being a global pandemic, the COVID-19 outbreak received global media attention. In this study, we analyze news publications from CNN and The Guardian - two of the world's most influential media organizations. The dataset includes more than 36,000 articles, analyzed using the clinical and biomedical Natural Language Processing (NLP) models from the Spark NLP for Healthcare library, which enables a deeper analysis of medical concepts than previously achieved. The analysis covers key entities and phrases, observed biases, and change over time in news coverage by correlating mined medical symptoms…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Hamad bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Montclair State University（蒙特克莱尔州立大学）；Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（索非亚大学“圣克莱门特·奥里季斯基”）
We present the results and the main findings of the NLP4IF-2021 shared tasks. Task 1 focused on fighting the COVID-19 infodemic in social media, and it was offered in Arabic, Bulgarian, and English. Given a tweet, it asked to predict whether that tweet contains a verifiable claim, and if so, whether it is likely to be false, is of general interest, is likely to be harmful, and is worthy of manual fact-checking; also, whether it is harmful to society, and whether it requires the attention of policy makers. Task~2 focused on censorship detection, and was offered in Chinese. A total of ten teams …
University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar（白沙瓦工程技术大学）；IBM Research - Almaden（IBM阿尔马登研究中心）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women University（沙希德·贝娜齐尔·布托女子大学）
The paper presents our solutions for the MediaEval 2020 task namely FakeNews: Corona Virus and 5G Conspiracy Multimedia Twitter-Data-Based Analysis. The task aims to analyze tweets related to COVID-19 and 5G conspiracy theories to detect misinformation spreaders. The task is composed of two sub-tasks namely (i) text-based, and (ii) structure-based fake news detection. For the first task, we propose six different solutions relying on Bag of Words (BoW) and BERT embedding. Three of the methods aim at binary classification task by differentiating in 5G conspiracy and the rest of the COVID-19 rela…
The surging amount of biomedical literature & digital clinical records presents a growing need for text mining techniques that can not only identify but also semantically relate entities in unstructured data. In this paper we propose a text mining framework comprising of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) models, which expands on previous work in three main ways. First, we introduce two new RE model architectures -- an accuracy-optimized one based on BioBERT and a speed-optimized one utilizing crafted features over a Fully Connected Neural Network (FCNN). Second, we ev…
On the State of NLP Approaches to Modeling Depression in Social Media: A Post-COVID-19 Outlook
University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）；PRHLT Research Center（PRHLT研究中心）；Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Human Language Technology Research Center（人类语言技术研究中心）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学数学与计算机科学学院）
United Nations Global Pulse（联合国全球脉动）；Mila Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute（魁北克人工智能研究所）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；NYU Stern School of Business（纽约大学斯特恩商学院）；Institute for Data Science, Durham University（杜伦大学数据科学研究所）
Natural language processing (NLP) plays a significant role in tools for the COVID-19 pandemic response, from detecting misinformation on social media to helping to provide accurate clinical information or summarizing scientific research. However, the approaches developed thus far have not benefited all populations, regions or languages equally. We discuss ways in which current and future NLP approaches can be made more inclusive by covering low-resource languages, including alternative modalities, leveraging out-of-the-box tools and forming meaningful partnerships. We suggest several future di…
The George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）；Flagship Pioneering（Flagship Pioneering公司）
Iran, along with China, South Korea, and Italy was among the countries that were hit hard in the first wave of the COVID-19 spread. Twitter is one of the widely-used online platforms by Iranians inside and abroad for sharing their opinion, thoughts, and feelings about a wide range of issues. In this study, using more than 530,000 original tweets in Persian/Farsi on COVID-19, we analyzed the topics discussed among users, who are mainly Iranians, to gauge and track the response to the pandemic and how it evolved over time. We applied a combination of manual annotation of a random sample of tweet…
Social media is an appropriate source for analyzing public attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine and various brands. Nevertheless, there are few relevant studies. In the research, we collected tweet posts by the UK and US residents from the Twitter API during the pandemic and designed experiments to answer three main questions concerning vaccination. To get the dominant sentiment of the civics, we performed sentiment analysis by VADER and proposed a new method that can count the individual's influence. This allows us to go a step further in sentiment analysis and explain some of the fluctuati…
In the Chinese medical insurance industry, the assessor's role is essential and requires significant efforts to converse with the claimant. This is a highly professional job that involves many parts, such as identifying personal information, collecting related evidence, and making a final insurance report. Due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the previous offline insurance assessment has to be conducted online. However, for the junior assessor often lacking practical experience, it is not easy to quickly handle such a complex online procedure, yet this is important as the insurance comp…
University Of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）；Northern Illinois University（北伊利诺伊大学）；Ajivar LLC（Ajivar有限责任公司）
In this paper, we report experimental results on assessing the impact of COVID-19 on college students by processing free-form texts generated by them. By free-form texts, we mean textual entries posted by college students (enrolled in a four year US college) via an app specifically designed to assess and improve their mental health. Using a dataset comprising of more than 9000 textual entries from 1451 students collected over four months (split between pre and post COVID-19), and established NLP techniques, a) we assess how topics of most interest to student change between pre and post COVID-1…
With the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing urgency for medical community to keep up with the accelerating growth in the new coronavirus-related literature. As a result, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge has released a corpus of scholarly articles and is calling for machine learning approaches to help bridging the gap between the researchers and the rapidly growing publications. Here, we take advantage of the recent advances in pre-trained NLP models, BERT and OpenAI GPT-2, to solve this challenge by performing text summarization on this dataset. We evaluate the results using ROU…
Over the past year, research in various domains, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), has been accelerated to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, yet such research has just started on dialogue systems. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end dialogue system which aims to ease the isolation of people under self-quarantine. We conduct a control simulation experiment to assess the effects of the user interface, a web-based virtual agent called Nora vs. the android ERICA via a video call. The experimental results show that the android offers a more valuable user experience by giving the…
SRM University, Andhra Pradesh（SRM大学（安得拉邦））；University of Huddersfield（哈德斯菲尔德大学）
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) began in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and to date has infected over 148M people worldwide, resulting in 3.12M deaths. On March 10, 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared it as a global pandemic. Many academicians and researchers started to publish papers describing the latest discoveries on covid-19. The large influx of publications made it hard for other researchers to go through a large amount of data and find the appropriate one that helps their research. So, the proposed model attempts to extract relavent titles from the large corpus of re…
Online hate speech has caught everyone's attention from the news related to the COVID-19 pandemic, US elections, and worldwide protests. Online toxicity - an umbrella term for online hateful behavior, manifests itself in forms such as online hate speech. Hate speech is a deliberate attack directed towards an individual or a group motivated by the targeted entity's identity or opinions. The rising mass communication through social media further exacerbates the harmful consequences of online hate speech. While there has been significant research on hate-speech identification using Natural Langua…
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused drastic alternations in human life in all aspects. The government's laws in this regard affected the lifestyle of all people. Due to this fact studying the sentiment of individuals is essential to be aware of the future impacts of the coming pandemics. To contribute to this aim, we proposed an NLP (Natural Language Processing) model to analyze open-text answers in a survey in Persian and detect positive and negative feelings of the people in Iran. In this study, a distilBert transformer model was applied to take on this task. We deployed three approaches to per…
Text classifiers are at the core of many NLP applications and use a variety of algorithmic approaches and software. This paper introduces infrastructure and methodologies for text classifiers based on large-scale regular expressions. In particular, we describe how Facebook determines if a given piece of text - anything from a hashtag to a post - belongs to a narrow topic such as COVID-19. To fully define a topic and evaluate classifier performance we employ human-guided iterations of keyword discovery, but do not require labeled data. For COVID-19, we build two sets of regular expressions: (1)…
Instituto de Informática – Universidade Católica do Salvador (UCSAL)（萨尔瓦多天主教大学信息学院）
This paper aims to present how the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data augmentation techniques can improve the performance of a neural network for better detection of fake news in the Portuguese language. Fake news is one of the main controversies during the growth of the internet in the last decade. Verifying what is fact and what is false has proven to be a difficult task, while the dissemination of false news is much faster, which leads to the need for the creation of tools that, automated, assist in the process of verification of what is fact and what is false. In ord…
Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；University of California, San Francisco（加利福尼亚大学旧金山分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
This paper introduces CODA-19, a human-annotated dataset that codes the Background, Purpose, Method, Finding/Contribution, and Other sections of 10,966 English abstracts in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset. CODA-19 was created by 248 crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk within 10 days, and achieved labeling quality comparable to that of experts. Each abstract was annotated by nine different workers, and the final labels were acquired by majority vote. The inter-annotator agreement (Cohen's kappa) between the crowd and the biomedical expert (0.741) is comparable to inter-expert agreement…
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
In recent years, the introduction of the Transformer models sparked a revolution in natural language processing (NLP). BERT was one of the first text encoders using only the attention mechanism without any recurrent parts to achieve state-of-the-art results on many NLP tasks. This paper introduces a text classifier using topological data analysis. We use BERT's attention maps transformed into attention graphs as the only input to that classifier. The model can solve tasks such as distinguishing spam from ham messages, recognizing whether a sentence is grammatically correct, or evaluating a mov…
BERT-Deep CNN: State-of-the-Art for Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Tweets
University of Birjand（比尔詹德大学）；Dibrugarh University（迪布鲁加尔大学）；Fasa University（法萨大学）；Ferdowsi University of Mashhad（马什菲尔德大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Shahid Beheshti University（沙希德·贝赫什提大学）；Khulna University（库尔纳大学）
North South University（北南大学）；Taif University（塔伊夫大学）；Princess Sumaya University for Technology（苏玛雅公主科技大学）
This COVID-19 pandemic is so dreadful that it leads to severe anxiety, phobias, and complicated feelings or emotions. Even after vaccination against Coronavirus has been initiated, people feelings have become more diverse and complex, and our goal is to understand and unravel their sentiments in this research using some Deep Learning techniques. Social media is currently the best way to express feelings and emotions, and with the help of it, specifically Twitter, one can have a better idea of what is trending and what is going on in people minds. Our motivation for this research is to understa…
