203 research outputs found

    30th European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2023)

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    This is the abstract book of 30th European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2023

    Measuring the impact of COVID-19 on hospital care pathways

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    Care pathways in hospitals around the world reported significant disruption during the recent COVID-19 pandemic but measuring the actual impact is more problematic. Process mining can be useful for hospital management to measure the conformance of real-life care to what might be considered normal operations. In this study, we aim to demonstrate that process mining can be used to investigate process changes associated with complex disruptive events. We studied perturbations to accident and emergency (A &E) and maternity pathways in a UK public hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-incidentally the hospital had implemented a Command Centre approach for patient-flow management affording an opportunity to study both the planned improvement and the disruption due to the pandemic. Our study proposes and demonstrates a method for measuring and investigating the impact of such planned and unplanned disruptions affecting hospital care pathways. We found that during the pandemic, both A &E and maternity pathways had measurable reductions in the mean length of stay and a measurable drop in the percentage of pathways conforming to normative models. There were no distinctive patterns of monthly mean values of length of stay nor conformance throughout the phases of the installation of the hospital’s new Command Centre approach. Due to a deficit in the available A &E data, the findings for A &E pathways could not be interpreted

    Le goût d'Orval: constructing the taste of Orval beer through narratives

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    This study explores the construction of taste through narratives, using Orval beer as a case study. Often found on lists of the best or most unique beers in the world, Orval is a bottle conditioned, dry-hopped strong Belgian ale with Brettanomyces yeast, creating an orange-hue beer topped with a large volume of white foam. It is both easy to drink and complex in flavour. Made in southeastern Belgium within the walls of a Trappist Abbey, Orval is closely associated with the country of Belgium, a pilgrimage site for beer lovers because of its unique and diverse beer culture. In 2016 “Beer Culture in Belgium” was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Orval beer also carries the Authentic Trappist Product label, ensuring that this product is brewed under the supervision of Trappist monks or nuns, within the Abbey walls, and is non-profit. Additionally, the beer has a unique, distinctive taste. This dissertation explores narratives that tell of all these aspects. The first section, Narrating Belgium, examines how social and economic histories build Belgium as a beer nation, and how conversion narratives of Belgian beer enthusiasts support this theory. The Narrating Trappist section examines how the Legend of Orval and the history of Orval Abbey create a sense of place for Orval beer and how the Authentic Trappist Product label helps construct its terroir. The last section, Narrating Taste, focuses on narratives of taste as shared in online reviews of Orval beer. I first conduct lexical and network analysis of reviews on Untappd, RateBeer, and BeerAdvocate before focusing specifically on themes found in BeerAdvocate reviews. Through ethnographic and textual research, this dissertation introduces a folkloristic approach to taste and argues that both contextual and sensory elements are essential in building taste through narratives

    Figurative Language Detection using Deep Learning and Contextual Features

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    The size of data shared over the Internet today is gigantic. A big bulk of it comes from postings on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Some of it also comes from online news sites such as CNN and The Onion. This type of data is very good for data analysis since they are very personalized and specific. For years, researchers in academia and various industries have been analyzing this type of data. The purpose includes product marketing, event monitoring, and trend analysis. The highest usage for this type of analysis is to find out the sentiments of the public about a certain topic or product. This field is called sentiment analysis. The writers of such posts have no obligation to stick to only literal language. They also have the freedom to use figurative language in their publications. Hence, online posts can be categorized into two: Literal and Figurative. Literal posts contain words or sentences that are direct or straight to the point. On the contrary, figurative posts contain words, phrases, or sentences that carry different meanings than usual. This could flip the whole polarity of a given post. Due to this nature, it can jeopardize sentiment analysis works that focus primarily on the polarity of the posts. This makes figurative language one of the biggest problems in sentiment analysis. Hence, detecting it would be crucial and significant. However, the study of figurative language detection is non-trivial. There have been many existing works that tried to execute the task of detecting figurative language correctly, with different methodologies used. The results are impressive but still can be improved. This thesis offers a new way to solve this problem. There are essentially seven commonly used figurative language categories: sarcasm, metaphor, satire, irony, simile, humor, and hyperbole. This thesis focuses on three categories. The thesis aims to understand the contextual meaning behind the three figurative language categories, using a combination of deep learning architecture with manually extracted features and explore the use of well know machine learning classifiers for the detection tasks. In the process, it also aims to describe a descending list of features according to the importance. The deep learning architecture used in this work is Convolutional Neural Network, which is combined with manually extracted features that are carefully chosen based on the literature and understanding of each figurative language. The findings of this work clearly showed improvement in the evaluation metrics when compared to existing works in the same domain. This happens in all of the figurative language categories, proving the framework’s possession of quality

    Computational acquisition of knowledge in small-data environments: a case study in the field of energetics

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    The UK’s defence industry is accelerating its implementation of artificial intelligence, including expert systems and natural language processing (NLP) tools designed to supplement human analysis. This thesis examines the limitations of NLP tools in small-data environments (common in defence) in the defence-related energetic-materials domain. A literature review identifies the domain-specific challenges of developing an expert system (specifically an ontology). The absence of domain resources such as labelled datasets and, most significantly, the preprocessing of text resources are identified as challenges. To address the latter, a novel general-purpose preprocessing pipeline specifically tailored for the energetic-materials domain is developed. The effectiveness of the pipeline is evaluated. Examination of the interface between using NLP tools in data-limited environments to either supplement or replace human analysis completely is conducted in a study examining the subjective concept of importance. A methodology for directly comparing the ability of NLP tools and experts to identify important points in the text is presented. Results show the participants of the study exhibit little agreement, even on which points in the text are important. The NLP, expert (author of the text being examined) and participants only agree on general statements. However, as a group, the participants agreed with the expert. In data-limited environments, the extractive-summarisation tools examined cannot effectively identify the important points in a technical document akin to an expert. A methodology for the classification of journal articles by the technology readiness level (TRL) of the described technologies in a data-limited environment is proposed. Techniques to overcome challenges with using real-world data such as class imbalances are investigated. A methodology to evaluate the reliability of human annotations is presented. Analysis identifies a lack of agreement and consistency in the expert evaluation of document TRL.Open Acces

    The text classification pipeline: Starting shallow, going deeper

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    An increasingly relevant and crucial subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP), tackled in this PhD thesis from a computer science and engineering perspective, is the Text Classification (TC). Also in this field, the exceptional success of deep learning has sparked a boom over the past ten years. Text retrieval and categorization, information extraction and summarization all rely heavily on TC. The literature has presented numerous datasets, models, and evaluation criteria. Even if languages as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and others are employed in several works, from a computer science perspective the most used and referred language in the literature concerning TC is English. This is also the language mainly referenced in the rest of this PhD thesis. Even if numerous machine learning techniques have shown outstanding results, the classifier effectiveness depends on the capability to comprehend intricate relations and non-linear correlations in texts. In order to achieve this level of understanding, it is necessary to pay attention not only to the architecture of a model but also to other stages of the TC pipeline. In an NLP framework, a range of text representation techniques and model designs have emerged, including the large language models. These models are capable of turning massive amounts of text into useful vector representations that effectively capture semantically significant information. The fact that this field has been investigated by numerous communities, including data mining, linguistics, and information retrieval, is an aspect of crucial interest. These communities frequently have some overlap, but are mostly separate and do their research on their own. Bringing researchers from other groups together to improve the multidisciplinary comprehension of this field is one of the objectives of this dissertation. Additionally, this dissertation makes an effort to examine text mining from both a traditional and modern perspective. This thesis covers the whole TC pipeline in detail. However, the main contribution is to investigate the impact of every element in the TC pipeline to evaluate the impact on the final performance of a TC model. It is discussed the TC pipeline, including the traditional and the most recent deep learning-based models. This pipeline consists of State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) datasets used in the literature as benchmark, text preprocessing, text representation, machine learning models for TC, evaluation metrics and current SOTA results. In each chapter of this dissertation, I go over each of these steps, covering both the technical advancements and my most significant and recent findings while performing experiments and introducing novel models. The advantages and disadvantages of various options are also listed, along with a thorough comparison of the various approaches. At the end of each chapter, there are my contributions with experimental evaluations and discussions on the results that I have obtained during my three years PhD course. The experiments and the analysis related to each chapter (i.e., each element of the TC pipeline) are the main contributions that I provide, extending the basic knowledge of a regular survey on the matter of TC.An increasingly relevant and crucial subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP), tackled in this PhD thesis from a computer science and engineering perspective, is the Text Classification (TC). Also in this field, the exceptional success of deep learning has sparked a boom over the past ten years. Text retrieval and categorization, information extraction and summarization all rely heavily on TC. The literature has presented numerous datasets, models, and evaluation criteria. Even if languages as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and others are employed in several works, from a computer science perspective the most used and referred language in the literature concerning TC is English. This is also the language mainly referenced in the rest of this PhD thesis. Even if numerous machine learning techniques have shown outstanding results, the classifier effectiveness depends on the capability to comprehend intricate relations and non-linear correlations in texts. In order to achieve this level of understanding, it is necessary to pay attention not only to the architecture of a model but also to other stages of the TC pipeline. In an NLP framework, a range of text representation techniques and model designs have emerged, including the large language models. These models are capable of turning massive amounts of text into useful vector representations that effectively capture semantically significant information. The fact that this field has been investigated by numerous communities, including data mining, linguistics, and information retrieval, is an aspect of crucial interest. These communities frequently have some overlap, but are mostly separate and do their research on their own. Bringing researchers from other groups together to improve the multidisciplinary comprehension of this field is one of the objectives of this dissertation. Additionally, this dissertation makes an effort to examine text mining from both a traditional and modern perspective. This thesis covers the whole TC pipeline in detail. However, the main contribution is to investigate the impact of every element in the TC pipeline to evaluate the impact on the final performance of a TC model. It is discussed the TC pipeline, including the traditional and the most recent deep learning-based models. This pipeline consists of State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) datasets used in the literature as benchmark, text preprocessing, text representation, machine learning models for TC, evaluation metrics and current SOTA results. In each chapter of this dissertation, I go over each of these steps, covering both the technical advancements and my most significant and recent findings while performing experiments and introducing novel models. The advantages and disadvantages of various options are also listed, along with a thorough comparison of the various approaches. At the end of each chapter, there are my contributions with experimental evaluations and discussions on the results that I have obtained during my three years PhD course. The experiments and the analysis related to each chapter (i.e., each element of the TC pipeline) are the main contributions that I provide, extending the basic knowledge of a regular survey on the matter of TC

    Fuzzy spectral clustering methods for textual data

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    Nowadays, the development of advanced information technologies has determined an increase in the production of textual data. This inevitable growth accentuates the need to advance in the identification of new methods and tools able to efficiently analyse such kind of data. Against this background, unsupervised classification techniques can play a key role in this process since most of this data is not classified. Document clustering, which is used for identifying a partition of clusters in a corpus of documents, has proven to perform efficiently in the analyses of textual documents and it has been extensively applied in different fields, from topic modelling to information retrieval tasks. Recently, spectral clustering methods have gained success in the field of text classification. These methods have gained popularity due to their solid theoretical foundations which do not require any specific assumption on the global structure of the data. However, even though they prove to perform well in text classification problems, little has been done in the field of clustering. Moreover, depending on the type of documents analysed, it might be often the case that textual documents do not contain only information related to a single topic: indeed, there might be an overlap of contents characterizing different knowledge domains. Consequently, documents may contain information that is relevant to different areas of interest to some degree. The first part of this work critically analyses the main clustering algorithms used for text data, involving also the mathematical representation of documents and the pre-processing phase. Then, three novel fuzzy versions of spectral clustering algorithms for text data are introduced. The first one exploits the use of fuzzy K-medoids instead of K-means. The second one derives directly from the first one but is used in combination with Kernel and Set Similarity (KS2M), which takes into account the Jaccard index. Finally, in the third one, in order to enhance the clustering performance, a new similarity measure S∗ is proposed. This last one exploits the inherent sequential nature of text data by means of a weighted combination between the Spectrum string kernel function and a measure of set similarity. The second part of the thesis focuses on spectral bi-clustering algorithms for text mining tasks, which represent an interesting and partially unexplored field of research. In particular, two novel versions of fuzzy spectral bi-clustering algorithms are introduced. The two algorithms differ from each other for the approach followed in the identification of the document and the word partitions. Indeed, the first one follows a simultaneous approach while the second one a sequential approach. This difference leads also to a diversification in the choice of the number of clusters. The adequacy of all the proposed fuzzy (bi-)clustering methods is evaluated by experiments performed on both real and benchmark data sets

    Sensing the Cultural Significance with AI for Social Inclusion

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    Social Inclusion has been growing as a goal in heritage management. Whereas the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) called for tools of knowledge documentation, social media already functions as a platform for online communities to actively involve themselves in heritage-related discussions. Such discussions happen both in “baseline scenarios” when people calmly share their experiences about the cities they live in or travel to, and in “activated scenarios” when radical events trigger their emotions. To organize, process, and analyse the massive unstructured multi-modal (mainly images and texts) user-generated data from social media efficiently and systematically, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is shown to be indispensable. This thesis explores the use of AI in a methodological framework to include the contribution of a larger and more diverse group of participants with user-generated data. It is an interdisciplinary study integrating methods and knowledge from heritage studies, computer science, social sciences, network science, and spatial analysis. AI models were applied, nurtured, and tested, helping to analyse the massive information content to derive the knowledge of cultural significance perceived by online communities. The framework was tested in case study cities including Venice, Paris, Suzhou, Amsterdam, and Rome for the baseline and/or activated scenarios. The AI-based methodological framework proposed in this thesis is shown to be able to collect information in cities and map the knowledge of the communities about cultural significance, fulfilling the expectation and requirement of HUL, useful and informative for future socially inclusive heritage management processes
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