3,868 research outputs found
What's unusual in online disease outbreak news?
Background: Accurate and timely detection of public health events of
international concern is necessary to help support risk assessment and response
and save lives. Novel event-based methods that use the World Wide Web as a
signal source offer potential to extend health surveillance into areas where
traditional indicator networks are lacking. In this paper we address the issue
of systematically evaluating online health news to support automatic alerting
using daily disease-country counts text mined from real world data using
BioCaster. For 18 data sets produced by BioCaster, we compare 5 aberration
detection algorithms (EARS C2, C3, W2, F-statistic and EWMA) for performance
against expert moderated ProMED-mail postings. Results: We report sensitivity,
specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV),
mean alerts/100 days and F1, at 95% confidence interval (CI) for 287
ProMED-mail postings on 18 outbreaks across 14 countries over a 366 day period.
Results indicate that W2 had the best F1 with a slight benefit for day of week
effect over C2. In drill down analysis we indicate issues arising from the
granular choice of country-level modeling, sudden drops in reporting due to day
of week effects and reporting bias. Automatic alerting has been implemented in
BioCaster available from http://born.nii.ac.jp. Conclusions: Online health news
alerts have the potential to enhance manual analytical methods by increasing
throughput, timeliness and detection rates. Systematic evaluation of health
news aberrations is necessary to push forward our understanding of the complex
relationship between news report volumes and case numbers and to select the
best performing features and algorithms
Towards cross-lingual alerting for bursty epidemic events
Background: Online news reports are increasingly becoming a source for event
based early warning systems that detect natural disasters. Harnessing the
massive volume of information available from multilingual newswire presents as
many challenges as opportunities due to the patterns of reporting complex
spatiotemporal events. Results: In this article we study the problem of
utilising correlated event reports across languages. We track the evolution of
16 disease outbreaks using 5 temporal aberration detection algorithms on
text-mined events classified according to disease and outbreak country. Using
ProMED reports as a silver standard, comparative analysis of news data for 13
languages over a 129 day trial period showed improved sensitivity, F1 and
timeliness across most models using cross-lingual events. We report a detailed
case study analysis for Cholera in Angola 2010 which highlights the challenges
faced in correlating news events with the silver standard. Conclusions: The
results show that automated health surveillance using multilingual text mining
has the potential to turn low value news into high value alerts if informed
choices are used to govern the selection of models and data sources. An
implementation of the C2 alerting algorithm using multilingual news is
available at the BioCaster portal http://born.nii.ac.jp/?page=globalroundup
Towards Building a Knowledge Base of Monetary Transactions from a News Collection
We address the problem of extracting structured representations of economic
events from a large corpus of news articles, using a combination of natural
language processing and machine learning techniques. The developed techniques
allow for semi-automatic population of a financial knowledge base, which, in
turn, may be used to support a range of data mining and exploration tasks. The
key challenge we face in this domain is that the same event is often reported
multiple times, with varying correctness of details. We address this challenge
by first collecting all information pertinent to a given event from the entire
corpus, then considering all possible representations of the event, and
finally, using a supervised learning method, to rank these representations by
the associated confidence scores. A main innovative element of our approach is
that it jointly extracts and stores all attributes of the event as a single
representation (quintuple). Using a purpose-built test set we demonstrate that
our supervised learning approach can achieve 25% improvement in F1-score over
baseline methods that consider the earliest, the latest or the most frequent
reporting of the event.Comment: Proceedings of the 17th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital
Libraries (JCDL '17), 201
Semantics-based information extraction for detecting economic events
As today's financial markets are sensitive to breaking news on economic events, accurate and timely automatic identification of events in news items is crucial. Unstructured news items originating from many heterogeneous sources have to be mined in order to extract knowledge useful for guiding decision making processes. Hence, we propose the Semantics-Based Pipeline for Economic Event Detection (SPEED), focusing on extracting financial events from news articles and annotating these with meta-data at a speed that enables real-time use. In our implementation, we use some components of an existing framework as well as new components, e.g., a high-performance Ontology Gazetteer, a Word Group Look-Up component, a Word Sense Disambiguator, and components for detecting economic events. Through their interaction with a domain-specific ontology, our novel, semantically enabled components constitute a feedback loop which fosters future reuse of acquired knowledge in the event detection process
What May Visualization Processes Optimize?
In this paper, we present an abstract model of visualization and inference
processes and describe an information-theoretic measure for optimizing such
processes. In order to obtain such an abstraction, we first examined six
classes of workflows in data analysis and visualization, and identified four
levels of typical visualization components, namely disseminative,
observational, analytical and model-developmental visualization. We noticed a
common phenomenon at different levels of visualization, that is, the
transformation of data spaces (referred to as alphabets) usually corresponds to
the reduction of maximal entropy along a workflow. Based on this observation,
we establish an information-theoretic measure of cost-benefit ratio that may be
used as a cost function for optimizing a data visualization process. To
demonstrate the validity of this measure, we examined a number of successful
visualization processes in the literature, and showed that the
information-theoretic measure can mathematically explain the advantages of such
processes over possible alternatives.Comment: 10 page
MultiMWE: building a multi-lingual multi-word expression (MWE) parallel corpora
Multi-word expressions (MWEs) are a hot topic in research in natural language processing (NLP), including topics such as MWE detection, MWE decomposition, and research investigating the exploitation of MWEs in other NLP fields such as Machine Translation. However, the availability of bilingual or multi-lingual MWE corpora is very limited. The only bilingual MWE corpora that we are aware of is from the PARSEME (PARSing and Multi-word Expressions) EU project. This is a small collection of only 871 pairs of English-German MWEs. In this paper, we present multi-lingual and bilingual MWE corpora that we have extracted from root parallel corpora. Our collections are 3,159,226 and 143,042 bilingual MWE pairs for German-English and Chinese-English respectively after filtering. We examine the quality of these extracted bilingual MWEs in MT experiments. Our initial experiments applying MWEs in MT show improved translation performances on MWE terms in qualitative analysis and better general evaluation scores in quantitative analysis, on both German-English and Chinese-English language pairs. We follow a standard experimental pipeline to create our MultiMWE corpora which are available online. Researchers can use this free corpus for their own models or use them in a knowledge base as model features
Semantic Knowledge Graphs for the News: A Review
ICT platforms for news production, distribution, and consumption must exploit the ever-growing availability of digital data. These data originate from different sources and in different formats; they arrive at different velocities and in different volumes. Semantic knowledge graphs (KGs) is an established technique for integrating such heterogeneous information. It is therefore well-aligned with the needs of news producers and distributors, and it is likely to become increasingly important for the news industry. This article reviews the research on using semantic knowledge graphs for production, distribution, and consumption of news. The purpose is to present an overview of the field; to investigate what it means; and to suggest opportunities and needs for further research and development.publishedVersio
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