scholarly journals An Augmented Multilingual Twitter Dataset for Studying the COVID-19 Infodemic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian E. Lopez ◽  
Caleb Gallemore

Abstract We present an openly available dataset to facilitate researchers’ exploration of popular discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic. The dataset, whose collection is ongoing, currently consists of over 780 million tweets, from all over the world, in multiple languages. Tweets start from 22 January 2020, when the total cases of reported COVID-19 were below 600 worldwide. The dataset was collected using the Twitter API and by rehydrating tweets from another openly available database. To facilitate access for other researchers, the English-language tweet data has been augmented by state-of-the-art Twitter sentiment and named entity recognition algorithms. The dataset and the summary files we provide allow researchers to avoid some computationally intensive analyses, facilitating more widespread use of social media data to gain insights on issues such as (mis)information diffusion, semantic networks, sentiment, and the evolution of COVID-19 discussions. The insights extracted from such analyses could help inform policy and advocacy work amid the current and future pandemics.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Pérez-Díez ◽  
Raúl Pérez-Moraga ◽  
Adolfo López-Cerdán ◽  
Jose-Maria Salinas-Serrano ◽  
María de la Iglesia-Vayá

Abstract Background Medical texts such as radiology reports or electronic health records are a powerful source of data for researchers. Anonymization methods must be developed to de-identify documents containing personal information from both patients and medical staff. Although currently there are several anonymization strategies for the English language, they are also language-dependent. Here, we introduce a named entity recognition strategy for Spanish medical texts, translatable to other languages. Results We tested 4 neural networks on our radiology reports dataset, achieving a recall of 97.18% of the identifying entities. Alongside, we developed a randomization algorithm to substitute the detected entities with new ones from the same category, making it virtually impossible to differentiate real data from synthetic data. The three best architectures were tested with the MEDDOCAN challenge dataset of electronic health records as an external test, achieving a recall of 69.18%. Conclusions The strategy proposed, combining named entity recognition tasks with randomization of entities, is suitable for Spanish radiology reports. It does not require a big training corpus, thus it could be easily extended to other languages and medical texts, such as electronic health records.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (S7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifei Wang ◽  
Sophia Ananiadou ◽  
Jun’ichi Tsujii

Abstract Background Clinical Named Entity Recognition is to find the name of diseases, body parts and other related terms from the given text. Because Chinese language is quite different with English language, the machine cannot simply get the graphical and phonetic information form Chinese characters. The method for Chinese should be different from that for English. Chinese characters present abundant information with the graphical features, recent research on Chinese word embedding tries to use graphical information as subword. This paper uses both graphical and phonetic features to improve Chinese Clinical Named Entity Recognition based on the presence of phono-semantic characters. Methods This paper proposed three different embedding models and tested them on the annotated data. The data have been divided into two sections for exploring the effect of the proportion of phono-semantic characters. Results The model using primary radical and pinyin can improve Clinical Named Entity Recognition in Chinese and get the F-measure of 0.712. More phono-semantic characters does not give a better result. Conclusions The paper proves that the use of the combination of graphical and phonetic features can improve the Clinical Named Entity Recognition in Chinese.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Pérez-Díez ◽  
Raúl Pérez-Moraga ◽  
Adolfo López-Cerdán ◽  
Jose-Maria Salinas-Serrano ◽  
María de la Iglesia-Vayá

Medical texts such as radiology reports or electronic health records are a powerful source of data for researchers. Anonymization methods must be developed to de-identify documents containing personal information from both patients and medical staff. Although currently there are several anonymization strategies for the English language, they are also language-dependent. Here, we introduce a named entity recognition strategy for Spanish medical texts, translatable to other languages. We tested 4 neural networks on our radiology reports dataset, achieving a recall of 97.18% of the identifying entities. Along-side, we developed a randomization algorithm to substitute the detected entities with new ones from the same category, making it virtually impossible to differentiate real data from synthetic data. The three best architectures were tested with the MEDDOCAN challenge dataset of electronic health records as an external test, achieving a recall of 69.18%. The strategy proposed, combining named entity recognition tasks with randomization of entities, is suitable for Spanish radiology reports. It does not require a big training corpus, thus it can be easily extended to other languages and medical texts, such as electronic health records.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shintaro Tsuji ◽  
Andrew Wen ◽  
Naoki Takahashi ◽  
Hongjian Zhang ◽  
Katsuhiko Ogasawara ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Named entity recognition (NER) plays an important role in extracting the features of descriptions for mining free-text radiology reports. However, the performance of existing NER tools is limited because the number of entities depends on its dictionary lookup. Especially, the recognition of compound terms is very complicated because there are a variety of patterns. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study is to develop and evaluate a NER tool concerned with compound terms using the RadLex for mining free-text radiology reports. METHODS We leveraged the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES) to develop customized pipelines using both RadLex and SentiWordNet (a general-purpose dictionary, GPD). We manually annotated 400 of radiology reports for compound terms (Cts) in noun phrases and used them as the gold standard for the performance evaluation (precision, recall, and F-measure). Additionally, we also created a compound-term-enhanced dictionary (CtED) by analyzing false negatives (FNs) and false positives (FPs), and applied it for another 100 radiology reports for validation. We also evaluated the stem terms of compound terms, through defining two measures: an occurrence ratio (OR) and a matching ratio (MR). RESULTS The F-measure of the cTAKES+RadLex+GPD was 32.2% (Precision 92.1%, Recall 19.6%) and that of combined the CtED was 67.1% (Precision 98.1%, Recall 51.0%). The OR indicated that stem terms of “effusion”, "node", "tube", and "disease" were used frequently, but it still lacks capturing Cts. The MR showed that 71.9% of stem terms matched with that of ontologies and RadLex improved about 22% of the MR from the cTAKES default dictionary. The OR and MR revealed that the characteristics of stem terms would have the potential to help generate synonymous phrases using ontologies. CONCLUSIONS We developed a RadLex-based customized pipeline for parsing radiology reports and demonstrated that CtED and stem term analysis has the potential to improve dictionary-based NER performance toward expanding vocabularies.


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