Infoveillance of the Croatian Online Media during the COVID-19 Pandemic: a One-Year Longitudinal NLP Study (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Slobodan Beliga ◽  
Sanda Martinčić-Ipšić ◽  
Mihaela Matešić ◽  
Irena Petrijevčanin Vuksanović ◽  
Ana Meštrović

BACKGROUND Online media plays an important role in public health emergencies and serves as a communication platform. Infoveillance of online media during the COVID-19 pandemic is an important step toward a better understanding of crisis communication. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study is to perform a longitudinal analysis of the COVID-19 related content based on natural language processing methods. METHODS We collected dataset of news articles published by Croatian online media during the first 13 months of the pandemic. Firstly, we test the correlations between the number of articles and the number of new daily COVID-19 cases. Secondly, we analyze the content by extracting the most frequent terms and apply the Jaccard similarity. Next, we compare the occurrence of the pandemic-related terms during the two waves of the pandemic. Finally, we apply named entity recognition to extract the most frequent entities and track the dynamics of changes during the observed period. RESULTS The results show there is no significant correlation between the number of articles and the number of new daily COVID-19 cases. Furthermore, there are high overlaps in the terminology used in all articles published during the pandemic with a slight shift in the pandemic-related terms between the first and the second wave. Finally, the findings indicate that the most influential entities have lower overlaps for identified persons and higher overlaps for locations and institutions. CONCLUSIONS Our study shows that online media has a prompt response to the pandemic with a large number of COVID-19 related articles. There is a high overlap in the frequently used terms across the first 13 months, which may indicate the lower quality of reporting in certain periods. However, the pandemic-related terminology is well covered.

Data ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Gonçalo Carnaz ◽  
Mário Antunes ◽  
Vitor Beires Nogueira

Criminal investigations collect and analyze the facts related to a crime, from which the investigators can deduce evidence to be used in court. It is a multidisciplinary and applied science, which includes interviews, interrogations, evidence collection, preservation of the chain of custody, and other methods and techniques of investigation. These techniques produce both digital and paper documents that have to be carefully analyzed to identify correlations and interactions among suspects, places, license plates, and other entities that are mentioned in the investigation. The computerized processing of these documents is a helping hand to the criminal investigation, as it allows the automatic identification of entities and their relations, being some of which difficult to identify manually. There exists a wide set of dedicated tools, but they have a major limitation: they are unable to process criminal reports in the Portuguese language, as an annotated corpus for that purpose does not exist. This paper presents an annotated corpus, composed of a collection of anonymized crime-related documents, which were extracted from official and open sources. The dataset was produced as the result of an exploratory initiative to collect crime-related data from websites and conditioned-access police reports. The dataset was evaluated and a mean precision of 0.808, recall of 0.722, and F1-score of 0.733 were obtained with the classification of the annotated named-entities present in the crime-related documents. This corpus can be employed to benchmark Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and tools to detect and correlate entities in the documents. Some examples are sentence detection, named-entity recognition, and identification of terms related to the criminal domain.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Yingwen Fu ◽  
Nankai Lin ◽  
Xiaotian Lin ◽  
Shengyi Jiang

Named entity recognition (NER) is fundamental to natural language processing (NLP). Most state-of-the-art researches on NER are based on pre-trained language models (PLMs) or classic neural models. However, these researches are mainly oriented to high-resource languages such as English. While for Indonesian, related resources (both in dataset and technology) are not yet well-developed. Besides, affix is an important word composition for Indonesian language, indicating the essentiality of character and token features for token-wise Indonesian NLP tasks. However, features extracted by currently top-performance models are insufficient. Aiming at Indonesian NER task, in this paper, we build an Indonesian NER dataset (IDNER) comprising over 50 thousand sentences (over 670 thousand tokens) to alleviate the shortage of labeled resources in Indonesian. Furthermore, we construct a hierarchical structured-attention-based model (HSA) for Indonesian NER to extract sequence features from different perspectives. Specifically, we use an enhanced convolutional structure as well as an enhanced attention structure to extract deeper features from characters and tokens. Experimental results show that HSA establishes competitive performance on IDNER and three benchmark datasets.


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.


Information ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyu Han ◽  
Yue Zhang ◽  
Wenkai Zhang ◽  
Tinglei Huang

Relation extraction is a vital task in natural language processing. It aims to identify the relationship between two specified entities in a sentence. Besides information contained in the sentence, additional information about the entities is verified to be helpful in relation extraction. Additional information such as entity type getting by NER (Named Entity Recognition) and description provided by knowledge base both have their limitations. Nevertheless, there exists another way to provide additional information which can overcome these limitations in Chinese relation extraction. As Chinese characters usually have explicit meanings and can carry more information than English letters. We suggest that characters that constitute the entities can provide additional information which is helpful for the relation extraction task, especially in large scale datasets. This assumption has never been verified before. The main obstacle is the lack of large-scale Chinese relation datasets. In this paper, first, we generate a large scale Chinese relation extraction dataset based on a Chinese encyclopedia. Second, we propose an attention-based model using the characters that compose the entities. The result on the generated dataset shows that these characters can provide useful information for the Chinese relation extraction task. By using this information, the attention mechanism we used can recognize the crucial part of the sentence that can express the relation. The proposed model outperforms other baseline models on our Chinese relation extraction dataset.


2014 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 469-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaled Shaalan

As more and more Arabic textual information becomes available through the Web in homes and businesses, via Internet and Intranet services, there is an urgent need for technologies and tools to process the relevant information. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an Information Extraction task that has become an integral part of many other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as Machine Translation and Information Retrieval. Arabic NER has begun to receive attention in recent years. The characteristics and peculiarities of Arabic, a member of the Semitic languages family, make dealing with NER a challenge. The performance of an Arabic NER component affects the overall performance of the NLP system in a positive manner. This article attempts to describe and detail the recent increase in interest and progress made in Arabic NER research. The importance of the NER task is demonstrated, the main characteristics of the Arabic language are highlighted, and the aspects of standardization in annotating named entities are illustrated. Moreover, the different Arabic linguistic resources are presented and the approaches used in Arabic NER field are explained. The features of common tools used in Arabic NER are described, and standard evaluation metrics are illustrated. In addition, a review of the state of the art of Arabic NER research is discussed. Finally, we present our conclusions. Throughout the presentation, illustrative examples are used for clarification.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
George Mastorakos ◽  
Aditya Khurana ◽  
Ming Huang ◽  
Sunyang Fu ◽  
Ahmad P. Tafti ◽  
...  

Background. Patients increasingly use asynchronous communication platforms to converse with care teams. Natural language processing (NLP) to classify content and automate triage of these messages has great potential to enhance clinical efficiency. We characterize the contents of a corpus of portal messages generated by patients using NLP methods. We aim to demonstrate descriptive analyses of patient text that can contribute to the development of future sophisticated NLP applications. Methods. We collected approximately 3,000 portal messages from the cardiology, dermatology, and gastroenterology departments at Mayo Clinic. After labeling these messages as either Active Symptom, Logistical, Prescription, or Update, we used NER (named entity recognition) to identify medical concepts based on the UMLS library. We hierarchically analyzed the distribution of these messages in terms of departments, message types, medical concepts, and keywords therewithin. Results. Active Symptom and Logistical content types comprised approximately 67% of the message cohort. The “Findings” medical concept had the largest number of keywords across all groupings of content types and departments. “Anatomical Sites” and “Disorders” keywords were more prevalent in Active Symptom messages, while “Drugs” keywords were most prevalent in Prescription messages. Logistical messages tended to have the lower proportions of “Anatomical Sites,”, “Disorders,”, “Drugs,”, and “Findings” keywords when compared to other message content types. Conclusions. This descriptive corpus analysis sheds light on the content and foci of portal messages. The insight into the content and differences among message themes can inform the development of more robust NLP models.


2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-99
Author(s):  
A.M. Yelenov ◽  
◽  
A.B. Jaxylykova ◽  

This research focuses on a comparative study of the Named Entity Recognition task for scientific article texts. Natural language processing could be considered as one of the cornerstones in the machine learning area which devotes its attention to the problems connected with the understanding of different natural languages and linguistic analysis. It was already shown that current deep learning techniques have a good performance and accuracy in such areas as image recognition, pattern recognition, computer vision, that could mean that such technology probably would be successful in the neuro-linguistic programming area too and lead to a dramatic increase on the research interest on this topic. For a very long time, quite trivial algorithms have been used in this area, such as support vector machines or various types of regression, basic encoding on text data was also used, which did not provide high results. The following dataset was used to process the experiment models: Dataset Scientific Entity Relation Core. The algorithms used were Long short-term memory, Random Forest Classifier with Conditional Random Fields, and Named-entity recognition with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. In the findings, the metrics scores of all models were compared to each other to make a comparison. This research is devoted to the processing of scientific articles, concerning the machine learning area, because the subject is not investigated on enough properly level.The consideration of this task can help machines to understand natural languages better, so that they can solve other neuro-linguistic programming tasks better, enhancing scores in common sense.


Author(s):  
Ayush Srivastav ◽  
Hera Khan ◽  
Amit Kumar Mishra

The chapter provides an eloquent account of the major methodologies and advances in the field of Natural Language Processing. The most popular models that have been used over time for the task of Natural Language Processing have been discussed along with their applications in their specific tasks. The chapter begins with the fundamental concepts of regex and tokenization. It provides an insight to text preprocessing and its methodologies such as Stemming and Lemmatization, Stop Word Removal, followed by Part-of-Speech tagging and Named Entity Recognition. Further, this chapter elaborates the concept of Word Embedding, its various types, and some common frameworks such as word2vec, GloVe, and fastText. A brief description of classification algorithms used in Natural Language Processing is provided next, followed by Neural Networks and its advanced forms such as Recursive Neural Networks and Seq2seq models that are used in Computational Linguistics. A brief description of chatbots and Memory Networks concludes the chapter.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 21-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Hema ◽  
T. V. Geetha

The two main challenges in chemical entity recognition are: (i) New chemical compounds are constantly being synthesized infinitely. (ii) High ambiguity in chemical representation in which a chemical entity is being described by different nomenclatures. Therefore, the identification and maintenance of chemical terminologies is a tough task. Since most of the existing text mining methods followed the term-based approaches, the problems of polysemy and synonymy came into the picture. So, a Named Entity Recognition (NER) system based on pattern matching in chemical domain is developed to extract the chemical entities from chemical documents. The Tf-idf and PMI association measures are used to filter out the non-chemical terms. The F-score of 92.19% is achieved for chemical NER. This proposed method is compared with the baseline method and other existing approaches. As the final step, the filtered chemical entities are classified into sixteen functional groups. The classification is done using SVM One against All multiclass classification approach and achieved the accuracy of 87%. One-way ANOVA is used to test the quality of pattern matching method with the other existing chemical NER methods.


Data ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Nasser Alshammari ◽  
Saad Alanazi

This article outlines a novel data descriptor that provides the Arabic natural language processing community with a dataset dedicated to named entity recognition tasks for diseases. The dataset comprises more than 60 thousand words, which were annotated manually by two independent annotators using the inside–outside (IO) annotation scheme. To ensure the reliability of the annotation process, the inter-annotator agreements rate was calculated, and it scored 95.14%. Due to the lack of research efforts in the literature dedicated to studying Arabic multi-annotation schemes, a distinguishing and a novel aspect of this dataset is the inclusion of six more annotation schemes that will bridge the gap by allowing researchers to explore and compare the effects of these schemes on the performance of the Arabic named entity recognizers. These annotation schemes are IOE, IOB, BIES, IOBES, IE, and BI. Additionally, five linguistic features, including part-of-speech tags, stopwords, gazetteers, lexical markers, and the presence of the definite article, are provided for each record in the dataset.


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