Thematic Analysis of Words that Invoke Values in the Net Neutrality Debate

This paper describes an initial analysis of the association of specific vocabulary choices with the invocation of human values in testimonies prepared for public hearings about Net neutrality in the United States. Motivation for this work comes from an interest in understanding what people value and how they express those values in writing. Related work includes research on human values from fields ranging from social psychology to advertising to human-computer interaction. First, human annotators used closed coding to identify human values in testimonies based on a prior meta-analysis of human values. Next, a “values dictionary” was automatically learned that identifies words that are strongly associated with sentences that human annotators coded as being related to specific values. Finally, an open-ended thematic analysis was conducted. The contribution of the paper is to enhance our understanding of how human values are expressed, as well as to introduce and evaluate a new automated tool for facilitating social science research.ye

The effect of immunomodulators on the immunogenicity of TNF-blocking therapeutic monoclonal antibodies: a review

Therapeutic monoclonal antibodies have revolutionized the treatment of various inflammatory diseases. Immunogenicity against these antibodies has been shown to be clinically important: it is associated with shorter response duration because of diminishing concentrations in the blood and with infusion reactions. Concomitant immunomodulators in the form of methotrexate or azathioprine reduced the immunogenicity of therapeutic antibodies in rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn disease, and juvenile idiopathic arthritis. The occurrence of adverse events does not increase when immunomodulators are added to therapeutic antibodies. The mechanism whereby methotrexate and azathioprine influence immunogenicity remains unclear. Evidence-based consensus on prescribing concomitant immunomodulators is needed

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Comprehensive systematic review and pooled analysis of real‐world studies evaluating immunomodulator and biologic therapies for chronic pouchitis treatment

Abstract Background and Aim Pouchitis is a common complication after restorative ileal pouch–anal anastomosis following proctocolectomy for ulcerative colitis. Antibiotic‐dependent or antibiotic‐refractory chronic pouchitis (CP), which is a common cause of pouch failure affecting 15–20% of patients, is challenging to treat. The efficacy of second‐line immunomodulator and biologic therapy remains poorly defined. We present a pooled analysis of real‐world efficacy data from peer‐reviewed full‐text manuscripts, focusing on immunomodulator and biologic therapies in CP. Methods Embase and PubMed databases were searched for full‐text articles describing the treatment of CP. We performed a systematic review and pooled analysis of published studies to assess the efficacy of immunomodulators, including thiopurines and methotrexate, and biologics including antitumor necrosis factor, anti‐integrin, and interleukin‐12/23 antagonists. Clinical and endoscopic response and remission rates were combined for pooled analyses. Rates of treatment discontinuation and safety were also assessed. Results Pooled analysis comprised 20 full‐text articles (485 patients). Overall clinical response rate was 46% (95% CI: 35–59%) and clinical remission rate was 35% (95% CI: 21–52%). Overall endoscopic response and remission rates were 41% (95% CI: 18–68%) and 15% (95% CI: 5–39%), respectively. Individual agents' safety profile was reassuring, with vedolizumab being the most favorable. Conclusion The real‐world efficacy data of immunomodulators in the treatment of CP is insufficient. Vedolizumab and ustekinumab appeared effective and safe for CP, whereas anti‐TNFs showed higher rates of adverse events. The high heterogeneity within the studies is attributed to the real‐world study design, obfuscating drug efficacy comparisons across the studies. Further studies are required to define the comparative effectiveness of available treatments of CP