A Machine Learning Application for Raising WASH Awareness in the Times of COVID-19 Pandemic (Preprint)

Author(s):  
Rohan Pandey ◽  
Vaibhav Gautam ◽  
Ridam Pal ◽  
Harsh Bandhey ◽  
Lovedeep Singh Dhingra ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered the potential of digital misinformation in shaping the health of nations. The deluge of unverified information that spreads faster than the epidemic itself is an unprecedented phenomenon that has put millions of lives in danger. Mitigating this ‘Infodemic’ requires strong health messaging systems that are engaging, vernacular, scalable, effective and continuously learn the new patterns of misinformation. OBJECTIVE We created WashKaro, a multi-pronged intervention for mitigating misinformation through conversational AI, machine translation and natural language processing. WashKaro provides the right information matched against WHO guidelines through AI, and delivers it in the right format in local languages. METHODS We theorize (i) an NLP based AI engine that could continuously incorporate user feedback to improve relevance of information, (ii) bite sized audio in the local language to improve penetrance in a country with skewed gender literacy ratios, and (iii) conversational but interactive AI engagement with users towards an increased health awareness in the community. RESULTS A total of 5026 people who downloaded the app during the study window, among those 1545 were active users. Our study shows that 3.4 times more females engaged with the App in Hindi as compared to males, the relevance of AI-filtered news content doubled within 45 days of continuous machine learning, and the prudence of integrated AI chatbot “Satya” increased thus proving the usefulness of an mHealth platform to mitigate health misinformation. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that a multi-pronged machine learning application delivering vernacular bite-sized audios and conversational AI is an effective approach to mitigate health misinformation. CLINICALTRIAL Not Applicable

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohan Pandey ◽  
Vaibhav Gautam ◽  
Ridam Pal ◽  
Harsh Bandhey ◽  
Lovedeep Singh Dhingra ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered the potential of digital misinformation in shaping the health of nations. The deluge of unverified information that spreads faster than the epidemic itself is an unprecedented phenomenon that has put millions of lives in danger. Mitigating this ‘Infodemic’ requires robust health messaging systems that are engaging, vernacular, scalable, effective, and continuously learn new misinformation patterns.Objective: We created WashKaro, a multi-pronged intervention for mitigating misinformation through conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine translation and natural language processing (NLP). WashKaro provides the correct information matched against WHO guidelines through AI and delivers it in a suitable format in local languages. Results: A total of 5026 people downloaded the app during the study window; among those, 1545 were actively engaged users. Our study shows that 3.4 times more females engaged with the App in Hindi as compared to males, the relevance of AI-filtered news content doubled within 45 days of continuous machine learning, and the prudence of integrated AI chatbot “Satya” increased thus proving the usefulness of a mHealth platform to mitigate health misinformation.Conclusion: We conclude that a machine learning application delivering bite-sized vernacular audios and conversational AI is a practical approach to mitigate health misinformation.


Author(s):  
Rachid Ammari ◽  
Ahbib Zenkoua

Our work aims to present an amazigh pronominal morphological analyzer (APMorph) based on xerox’s finite-state transducer (XFST). Our system revolves around a large lexicon named “APlex” including the affixed pronoun to the noun and to the verb and the characteristics relating to each lemma. A set of rules are added to define the inflectional behavior and morphosyntactic links of each entry as well as the relationship between the different lexical units. The implementation and the evaluation of our approach will be detailed within this article. The use of XFST remains a relevant choice in the sense that this platform allows both analysis and generation. The robustness of our system makes it able to be integrated in other applications of natural language processing (NLP) especially spellchecking, machine translation, and machine learning. This paper presents a continuation of our previous works on the automatic processing of Amazigh nouns and verbs.


2020 ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Peter Nabende

Natural Language Processing for under-resourced languages is now a mainstream research area. However, there are limited studies on Natural Language Processing applications for many indigenous East African languages. As a contribution to covering the current gap of knowledge, this paper focuses on evaluating the application of well-established machine translation methods for one heavily under-resourced indigenous East African language called Lumasaaba. Specifically, we review the most common machine translation methods in the context of Lumasaaba including both rule-based and data-driven methods. Then we apply a state of the art data-driven machine translation method to learn models for automating translation between Lumasaaba and English using a very limited data set of parallel sentences. Automatic evaluation results show that a transformer-based Neural Machine Translation model architecture leads to consistently better BLEU scores than the recurrent neural network-based models. Moreover, the automatically generated translations can be comprehended to a reasonable extent and are usually associated with the source language input.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. e100262
Author(s):  
Mustafa Khanbhai ◽  
Patrick Anyadi ◽  
Joshua Symons ◽  
Kelsey Flott ◽  
Ara Darzi ◽  
...  

ObjectivesUnstructured free-text patient feedback contains rich information, and analysing these data manually would require a lot of personnel resources which are not available in most healthcare organisations.To undertake a systematic review of the literature on the use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to process and analyse free-text patient experience data.MethodsDatabases were systematically searched to identify articles published between January 2000 and December 2019 examining NLP to analyse free-text patient feedback. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the studies, a narrative synthesis was deemed most appropriate. Data related to the study purpose, corpus, methodology, performance metrics and indicators of quality were recorded.ResultsNineteen articles were included. The majority (80%) of studies applied language analysis techniques on patient feedback from social media sites (unsolicited) followed by structured surveys (solicited). Supervised learning was frequently used (n=9), followed by unsupervised (n=6) and semisupervised (n=3). Comments extracted from social media were analysed using an unsupervised approach, and free-text comments held within structured surveys were analysed using a supervised approach. Reported performance metrics included the precision, recall and F-measure, with support vector machine and Naïve Bayes being the best performing ML classifiers.ConclusionNLP and ML have emerged as an important tool for processing unstructured free text. Both supervised and unsupervised approaches have their role depending on the data source. With the advancement of data analysis tools, these techniques may be useful to healthcare organisations to generate insight from the volumes of unstructured free-text data.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Oliwa ◽  
Steven B. Maron ◽  
Leah M. Chase ◽  
Samantha Lomnicki ◽  
Daniel V.T. Catenacci ◽  
...  

PURPOSE Robust institutional tumor banks depend on continuous sample curation or else subsequent biopsy or resection specimens are overlooked after initial enrollment. Curation automation is hindered by semistructured free-text clinical pathology notes, which complicate data abstraction. Our motivation is to develop a natural language processing method that dynamically identifies existing pathology specimen elements necessary for locating specimens for future use in a manner that can be re-implemented by other institutions. PATIENTS AND METHODS Pathology reports from patients with gastroesophageal cancer enrolled in The University of Chicago GI oncology tumor bank were used to train and validate a novel composite natural language processing-based pipeline with a supervised machine learning classification step to separate notes into internal (primary review) and external (consultation) reports; a named-entity recognition step to obtain label (accession number), location, date, and sublabels (block identifiers); and a results proofreading step. RESULTS We analyzed 188 pathology reports, including 82 internal reports and 106 external consult reports, and successfully extracted named entities grouped as sample information (label, date, location). Our approach identified up to 24 additional unique samples in external consult notes that could have been overlooked. Our classification model obtained 100% accuracy on the basis of 10-fold cross-validation. Precision, recall, and F1 for class-specific named-entity recognition models show strong performance. CONCLUSION Through a combination of natural language processing and machine learning, we devised a re-implementable and automated approach that can accurately extract specimen attributes from semistructured pathology notes to dynamically populate a tumor registry.


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