EliXR-TIME: A Temporal Knowledge Representation for Clinical Research Eligibility Criteria.

Effective clinical text processing requires accurate extraction and representation of temporal expressions. Multiple temporal information extraction models were developed but a similar need for extracting temporal expressions in eligibility criteria (e.g., for eligibility determination) remains. We identified the temporal knowledge representation requirements of eligibility criteria by reviewing 100 temporal criteria. We developed EliXR-TIME, a frame-based representation designed to support semantic annotation for temporal expressions in eligibility criteria by reusing applicable classes from well-known clinical temporal knowledge representations. We used EliXR-TIME to analyze a training set of 50 new temporal eligibility criteria. We evaluated EliXR-TIME using an additional random sample of 20 eligibility criteria with temporal expressions that have no overlap with the training data, yielding 92.7% (76 / 82) inter-coder agreement on sentence chunking and 72% (72 / 100) agreement on semantic annotation. We conclude that this knowledge representation can facilitate semantic annotation of the temporal expressions in eligibility criteria

Exploiting alignment techniques in MATREX: the DCU machine translation system for IWSLT 2008

In this paper, we give a description of the machine translation (MT) system developed at DCU that was used for our third participation in the evaluation campaign of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2008). In this participation, we focus on various techniques for word and phrase alignment to improve system quality. Specifically, we try out our word packing and syntax-enhanced word alignment techniques for the Chinese–English task and for the English–Chinese task for the first time. For all translation tasks except Arabic–English, we exploit linguistically motivated bilingual phrase pairs extracted from parallel treebanks. We smooth our translation tables with out-of-domain word translations for the Arabic–English and Chinese–English tasks in order to solve the problem of the high number of out of vocabulary items. We also carried out experiments combining both in-domain and out-of-domain data to improve system performance and, finally, we deploy a majority voting procedure combining a language model based method and a translation-based method for case and punctuation restoration. We participated in all the translation tasks and translated both the single-best ASR hypotheses and the correct recognition results. The translation results confirm that our new word and phrase alignment techniques are often helpful in improving translation quality, and the data combination method we proposed can significantly improve system performance

Correcting Knowledge Base Assertions

The usefulness and usability of knowledge bases (KBs) is often limited by quality issues. One common issue is the presence of erroneous assertions, often caused by lexical or semantic confusion. We study the problem of correcting such assertions, and present a general correction framework which combines lexical matching, semantic embedding, soft constraint mining and semantic consistency checking. The framework is evaluated using DBpedia and an enterprise medical KB

Stop Clickbait: Detecting and Preventing Clickbaits in Online News Media

Most of the online news media outlets rely heavily on the revenues generated from the clicks made by their readers, and due to the presence of numerous such outlets, they need to compete with each other for reader attention. To attract the readers to click on an article and subsequently visit the media site, the outlets often come up with catchy headlines accompanying the article links, which lure the readers to click on the link. Such headlines are known as Clickbaits. While these baits may trick the readers into clicking, in the long run, clickbaits usually don't live up to the expectation of the readers, and leave them disappointed. In this work, we attempt to automatically detect clickbaits and then build a browser extension which warns the readers of different media sites about the possibility of being baited by such headlines. The extension also offers each reader an option to block clickbaits she doesn't want to see. Then, using such reader choices, the extension automatically blocks similar clickbaits during her future visits. We run extensive offline and online experiments across multiple media sites and find that the proposed clickbait detection and the personalized blocking approaches perform very well achieving 93% accuracy in detecting and 89% accuracy in blocking clickbaits.Comment: 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM

Identity and Granularity of Events in Text

In this paper we describe a method to detect event descrip- tions in different news articles and to model the semantics of events and their components using RDF representations. We compare these descriptions to solve a cross-document event coreference task. Our com- ponent approach to event semantics defines identity and granularity of events at different levels. It performs close to state-of-the-art approaches on the cross-document event coreference task, while outperforming other works when assuming similar quality of event detection. We demonstrate how granularity and identity are interconnected and we discuss how se- mantic anomaly could be used to define differences between coreference, subevent and topical relations.Comment: Invited keynote speech by Piek Vossen at Cicling 201