Semantics Enhanced Deep Learning Medical Text Classifier

Electronic health records (EHR) contain a vast amount of data with the potential to leverage applications that improve patient outcomes and enhance the work of health care providers. A major portion of this data is inside unstructured text in the form of clinical narratives. To effectively use clinical text, NLP tools have been developed and applied to numerous problems involving clinical decision support systems, cohort identification, and phenotyping among others. However, one of the main problems that face the development of NLP tools for the clinical domain is the lack of large annotated data sets. Clinical language and report style variations are another major problem for clinical NLP. These variations lead to problems where NLP systems created with data from one institution exhibit significantly different performance when tested in a different institution. One way to address the lack of large annotated datasets and variations in clinical language is the explicit incorporation of semantics into the development of clinical NLP tools. Semantics allow us to know that the meaning of words, and thus help us account for language variations. In this work, we incorporate the semantics from ontologies into a loss function of a deep learning text classifier. Also, to specifically address the problem of the lack of large annotated datasets we used a large unannotated or unlabeled dataset, increasing the sample size as a result. To properly use such unlabeled data, we adapted a semi-supervised binary approach that uses the unlabeled dataset during training. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to do so, and for that reason, this is one of the main theoretical contributions of this work. Also, by reducing the need for extensive annotations, we believe this work could enable researchers in clinical settings to embrace and leverage the full potential of clinical NLP tools given the reduced effort required to achieve the desired performance. Furthermore, all the methods in this work are designed as reproducible and extensible software tools that aid further biomedical informatics research in this area

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Big Data mining and machine learning techniques applied to real world scenarios

Data mining techniques allow the extraction of valuable information from heterogeneous and possibly very large data sources, which can be either structured or unstructured. Unstructured data, such as text files, social media, mobile data, are much more than structured data, and grow at a higher rate. Their high volume and the inherent ambiguity of natural language make unstructured data very hard to process and analyze. Appropriate text representations are therefore required in order to capture word semantics as well as to preserve statistical information, e.g. word counts. In Big Data scenarios, scalability is also a primary requirement. Data mining and machine learning approaches should take advantage of large-scale data, exploiting abundant information and avoiding the curse of dimensionality. The goal of this thesis is to enhance text understanding in the analysis of big data sets, introducing novel techniques that can be employed for the solution of real world problems. The presented Markov methods temporarily achieved the state-of-the-art on well-known Amazon reviews corpora for cross-domain sentiment analysis, before being outperformed by deep approaches in the analysis of large data sets. A noise detection method for the identification of relevant tweets leads to 88.9% accuracy in the Dow Jones Industrial Average daily prediction, which is the best result in literature based on social networks. Dimensionality reduction approaches are used in combination with LinkedIn users' skills to perform job recommendation. A framework based on deep learning and Markov Decision Process is designed with the purpose of modeling job transitions and recommending pathways towards a given career goal. Finally, parallel primitives for vendor-agnostic implementation of Big Data mining algorithms are introduced to foster multi-platform deployment, code reuse and optimization

Proceedings of the Seventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2020

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Seventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2020). This edition of the conference is held in Bologna and organised by the University of Bologna. The CLiC-it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after six years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Tune your brown clustering, please

Brown clustering, an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique based on ngram mutual information, has proven useful in many NLP applications. However, most uses of Brown clustering employ the same default configuration; the appropriateness of this configuration has gone predominantly unexplored. Accordingly, we present information for practitioners on the behaviour of Brown clustering in order to assist hyper-parametre tuning, in the form of a theoretical model of Brown clustering utility. This model is then evaluated empirically in two sequence labelling tasks over two text types. We explore the dynamic between the input corpus size, chosen number of classes, and quality of the resulting clusters, which has an impact for any approach using Brown clustering. In every scenario that we examine, our results reveal that the values most commonly used for the clustering are sub-optimal

Natural Language Processing: Emerging Neural Approaches and Applications

This Special Issue highlights the most recent research being carried out in the NLP field to discuss relative open issues, with a particular focus on both emerging approaches for language learning, understanding, production, and grounding interactively or autonomously from data in cognitive and neural systems, as well as on their potential or real applications in different domains