Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease, which is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Due to the growing literature on COVID-19, it is hard to get precise, up-to-date information about the virus. Practitioners, front-line workers, and researchers require expert-specific methods to stay current on scientific knowledge and research findings. However, there are a lot of research papers being written on the subject, which makes it hard to keep up with the most recent research. This problem motivates us to propose the design of the COVID-19 Search Engine (CO-SE), which is an algorithmic system that finds relevant documents for each query (asked by a user) and answers complex questions by searching a large corpus of publications. The CO-SE has a retriever component trained on the TF-IDF vectorizer that retrieves the relevant documents from the system. It also consists of a reader component that consists of a Transformer-based model, which is used to read the paragraphs and find the answers related to the query from the retrieved documents. The proposed model has outperformed previous models, obtaining an exact match ratio score of 71.45% and a semantic answer similarity score of 78.55%. It also outperforms other benchmark datasets, demonstrating the generalizability of the proposed approach.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a tremendous need for access to the latest scientific information, primarily through the use of text mining and search tools. This has led to both corpora for biomedical articles related to COVID-19 (such as the CORD-19 corpus (Wang et al., 2020)) as well as search engines to query such data. While most research in search engines is performed in the academic field of information retrieval (IR), most academic search engines$\unicode{x2013}$though rigorously evaluated$\unicode{x2013}$are sparsely utilized, while major commercial web search engines (e.g., Goo…
In today's high-choice media environment, search engines play an integral role in informing individuals and societies about the latest events. The importance of search algorithms is even higher at the time of crisis, when users search for information to understand the causes and the consequences of the current situation and decide on their course of action. In our paper, we conduct a comparative audit of how different search engines prioritize visual information related to COVID-19 and what consequences it has for the representation of the pandemic. Using a virtual agent-based audit approach, …
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been declared as a pandemic by WHO with thousands of cases being reported each day. Numerous scientific articles are being published on the disease raising the need for a service which can organize, and query them in a reliable fashion. To support this cause we present AWS CORD-19 Search (ACS), a public, COVID-19 specific, neural search engine that is powered by several machine learning systems to support natural language based searches. ACS with capabilities such as document ranking, passage ranking, question answering and topic classification provides a sca…
With the surge of pretrained language models, a new pathway has been opened to incorporate Persian text contextual information. Meanwhile, as many other countries, including Iran, are fighting against COVID-19, a plethora of COVID-19 related articles has been published in Iranian Healthcare magazines to better inform the public of the situation. However, finding answers in this sheer volume of information is an extremely difficult task. In this paper, we collected a large dataset of these articles, leveraged different BERT variations as well as other keyword models such as BM25 and TF-IDF, and…
Understanding the public sentiment and perception in a healthcare crisis is essential for developing appropriate crisis management techniques. While some studies have used Twitter data for predictive modelling during COVID-19, fine-grained sentiment analysis of the opinion of people on social media during this pandemic has not yet been done. In this study, we perform an in-depth, fine-grained sentiment analysis of tweets in COVID-19. For this purpose, we perform supervised training of four transformer language models on the downstream task of multi-label classification of tweets into seven ton…
With the devastating outbreak of COVID-19, vaccines are one of the crucial lines of defense against mass infection in this global pandemic. Given the protection they provide, vaccines are becoming mandatory in certain social and professional settings. This paper presents a classification model for detecting COVID-19 vaccination related search queries, a machine learning model that is used to generate search insights for COVID-19 vaccinations. The proposed method combines and leverages advancements from modern state-of-the-art (SOTA) natural language understanding (NLU) techniques such as pretr…
University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；Clemson University（克莱姆森大学）；Charter School of Wilmington（威尔明顿特许学校）；University of S. Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）
In 2020, the White House released the, "Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset," wherein artificial intelligence experts are asked to collect data and develop text mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19. The Allen Institute for AI and collaborators announced the availability of a rapidly growing open dataset of publications, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). As the pace of research accelerates, biomedical scientists struggle to stay current. To expedite their investig…
Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar（印度理工学院甘地纳加尔分校）
The entire world is engulfed in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a significant surge in research experiments, government policies, and social media discussions. A multi-modal information access and data visualization platform can play a critical role in supporting research aimed at understanding and developing preventive measures for the pandemic. In this paper, we present a multi-faceted AI-based search and visualization engine, CovidExplorer. Our system aims to help researchers understand current state-of-the-art COVID-19 research, identify research articles relevant to th…
The rapid advancement of technology in online communication via social media platforms has led to a prolific rise in the spread of misinformation and fake news. Fake news is especially rampant in the current COVID-19 pandemic, leading to people believing in false and potentially harmful claims and stories. Detecting fake news quickly can alleviate the spread of panic, chaos and potential health hazards. We developed a two stage automated pipeline for COVID-19 fake news detection using state of the art machine learning models for natural language processing. The first model leverages a novel fa…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）
This report describes the participation of two Danish universities, University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University, in the international search engine competition on COVID-19 (the 2020 TREC-COVID Challenge) organised by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) division. The aim of the competition was to find the best search engine strategy for retrieving precise biomedical scientific information on COVID-19 from the largest, at that point in time, dataset of curated scientific literature on COVID-19 -- the COVID-19 Open Research D…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
We present the Neural Covidex, a search engine that exploits the latest neural ranking architectures to provide information access to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset curated by the Allen Institute for AI. This web application exists as part of a suite of tools that we have developed over the past few weeks to help domain experts tackle the ongoing global pandemic. We hope that improved information access capabilities to the scientific literature can inform evidence-based decision making and insight generation. This paper describes our initial efforts and offers a few thoughts about lessons …
Twitter and, in general, social media has become an indispensable communication channel in times of emergency. The ubiquitousness of smartphone gadgets enables people to declare an emergency observed in real-time. As a result, more agencies are interested in programmatically monitoring Twitter (disaster relief organizations and news agencies). Therefore, recognizing the informativeness of a Tweet can help filter noise from the large volumes of Tweets. In this paper, we present our submission for WNUT-2020 Task 2: Identification of informative COVID-19 English Tweets. Our most successful model …
Boğaziçi University（博加齐奇大学）；F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG（Hoffmann - La Roche 有限公司）
Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) created dire consequences globally and triggered an intense scientific effort from different domains. The resulting publications created a huge text collection in which finding the studies related to a biomolecule of interest is challenging for general purpose search engines because the publications are rich in domain specific terminology. Here, we present Vapur: an online COVID-19 search engine specifically designed to find related protein - chemical pairs. Vapur is empowered with a relation-oriented inverted index that is able to retrieve and group stud…
COVID19 was first reported in England at the end of January 2020, and by mid-June over 150,000 cases were reported. We assume that, similarly to influenza-like illnesses, people who suffer from COVID19 may query for their symptoms prior to accessing the medical system (or in lieu of it). Therefore, we analyzed searches to Bing from users in England, identifying cases where unexpected rises in relevant symptom searches occurred at specific areas of the country. Our analysis shows that searches for "fever" and "cough" were the most correlated with future case counts, with searches preceding case…
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has claimed the lives of over 350,000 people and infected more than 6 million people worldwide. Several search engines have surfaced to provide researchers with additional tools to find and retrieve information from the rapidly growing corpora on COVID-19. These engines lack extraction and visualization tools necessary to retrieve and interpret complex relations inherent to scientific literature. Moreover, because these engines mainly rely upon semantic information, their ability to capture complex global relationships across documents is limited, which reduc…
Previous work established skip-gram word2vec models could be used to mine knowledge in the materials science literature for the discovery of thermoelectrics. Recent transformer architectures have shown great progress in language modeling and associated fine-tuned tasks, but they have yet to be adapted for drug discovery. We present a RoBERTa transformer-based method that extends the masked language token prediction using query-target conditioning to treat the specificity challenge. The transformer discovery method entails several benefits over the word2vec method including domain-specific (ant…
University of Catania（卡塔尼亚大学）；INFN Sezione di Catania（意大利国家核物理研究所卡塔尼亚分部）；Complexity Science Hub Vienna（维也纳复杂性科学中心）
In early January 2020, after China reported the first cases of the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in the city of Wuhan, unreliable and not fully accurate information has started spreading faster than the virus itself. Alongside this pandemic, people have experienced a parallel infodemic, i.e., an overabundance of information, some of which misleading or even harmful, that has widely spread around the globe. Although Social Media are increasingly being used as information source, Web Search Engines, like Google or Yahoo!, still represent a powerful and trustworthy resource for finding information…
COVID-19 is one of the most important topic these days, specifically on search engines and news. While fake news are easily shared, scientific papers are reliable sources where information can be extracted. With about 24,000 scientific publications on COVID-19 and related research on PUBMED, automatic computer-assisted analysis is required. In this paper, we develop two methodologies to get insights on specific sub-topics of interest and latest research sub-topics. They rely on natural language processing and graph-based visualizations. We run these methodologies on two cases: the virus origin…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；CIFAR（加拿大高等研究院）
We present Covidex, a search engine that exploits the latest neural ranking models to provide information access to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset curated by the Allen Institute for AI. Our system has been online and serving users since late March 2020. The Covidex is the user application component of our three-pronged strategy to develop technologies for helping domain experts tackle the ongoing global pandemic. In addition, we provide robust and easy-to-use keyword search infrastructure that exploits mature fusion-based methods as well as standalone neural ranking models that can be inco…
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a rapidly growing 'infodemic' of health information online. This has motivated the need for accurate semantic search and retrieval of reliable COVID-19 information across millions of documents, in multiple languages. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel high precision and high recall neural Multistage BiCross encoder approach. It is a sequential three-stage ranking pipeline which uses the Okapi BM25 retrieval algorithm and transformer-based bi-encoder and cross-encoder to effectively rank the documents with respect to the given q…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, "Chinese Virus" emerged as a controversial term for coronavirus. To some, it may seem like a neutral term referring to the physical origin of the virus. To many others, however, the term is in fact attaching ethnicity to the virus. While both arguments appear reasonable, quantitative analysis of the term's real-world usage is lacking to shed light on the issues behind the controversy. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap. To model the substantive difference of tweets with controversial terms and those with non-controversial terms, we apply topic modeling and…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）
The COVID-19 pandemic has driven ever-greater demand for tools which enable efficient exploration of biomedical literature. Although semi-structured information resulting from concept recognition and detection of the defining elements of clinical trials (e.g. PICO criteria) has been commonly used to support literature search, the contributions of this abstraction remain poorly understood, especially in relation to text-based retrieval. In this study, we compare the results retrieved by a standard search engine with those filtered using clinically-relevant concepts and their relations. With ana…
[Background] Two clusters of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were confirmed in Hokkaido, Japan in February 2020. To capture the clusters, this study employs Web search query logs and user location information from smartphones. [Material and Methods] First, we anonymously identified smartphone users who used a Web search engine (Yahoo! JAPAN Search) for the COVID-19 or its symptoms via its companion application for smartphones (Yahoo Japan App). We regard these searchers as Web searchers who are suspicious of their own COVID-19 infection (WSSCI). Second, we extracted the location of the WSS…
The COVID-19 global pandemic has resulted in international efforts to understand, track, and mitigate the disease, yielding a significant corpus of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2-related publications across scientific disciplines. As of May 2020, 128,000 coronavirus-related publications have been collected through the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge. Here we present CO-Search, a retriever-ranker semantic search engine designed to handle complex queries over the COVID-19 literature, potentially aiding overburdened health workers in finding scientific answers during a time of crisis. The retri…
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）；Information School, University of Washington（华盛顿大学信息学院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）
The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked unprecedented mobilization of scientists, generating a deluge of papers that makes it hard for researchers to keep track and explore new directions. Search engines are designed for targeted queries, not for discovery of connections across a corpus. In this paper, we present SciSight, a system for exploratory search of COVID-19 research integrating two key capabilities: first, exploring associations between biomedical facets automatically extracted from papers (e.g., genes, drugs, diseases, patient outcomes); second, combining textual and network information to…
Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski”（索非亚大学“圣克里门特·奥赫里德斯基”）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
While misinformation and disinformation have been thriving in social media for years, with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the political and the health misinformation merged, thus elevating the problem to a whole new level and giving rise to the first global infodemic. The fight against this infodemic has many aspects, with fact-checking and debunking false and misleading claims being among the most important ones. Unfortunately, manual fact-checking is time-consuming and automatic fact-checking is resource-intense, which means that we need to pre-filter the input social media posts an…
