Cross-Lingual Text Reuse Detection at Document Level for English-Urdu Language Pair

In recent years, the problem of Cross-Lingual Text Reuse Detection (CLTRD) has gained the interest of the research community due to the availability of large digital repositories and automatic Machine Translation (MT) systems. These systems are readily available and openly accessible, which makes it easier to reuse text across languages but hard to detect. In previous studies, different corpora and methods have been developed for CLTRD at the sentence/passage level for the English-Urdu language pair. However, there is a lack of large standard corpora and methods for CLTRD for the English-Urdu language pair at the document level. To overcome this limitation, the significant contribution of this study is the development of a large benchmark cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse corpus, called the TREU (Text Reuse for English-Urdu) corpus. It contains English to Urdu real cases of text reuse at the document level. The corpus is manually labelled into three categories (Wholly Derived = 672, Partially Derived = 888, and Non Derived = 697) with the source text in English and the derived text in the Urdu language. Another contribution of this study is the evaluation of the TREU corpus using a diversified range of methods to show its usefulness and how it can be utilized in the development of automatic methods for measuring cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse at the document level. The best evaluation results, for both binary ( F 1 = 0.78) and ternary ( F 1 = 0.66) classification tasks, are obtained using a combination of all Translation plus Mono-lingual Analysis (T+MA) based methods. The TREU corpus is publicly available to promote CLTRD research in an under-resourced language, i.e. Urdu

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

CLEU- A Cross-Language-Urdu Corpus and Benchmark For Text Reuse Experiments

Text reuse is becoming a serious issue in many fields and research shows that it is much harder to detect when it occurs across languages. The recent rise in multi‐lingual content on the Web has increased cross‐language text reuse to an unprecedented scale. Although researchers have proposed methods to detect it, one major drawback is the unavailability of large‐scale gold standard evaluation resources built on real cases. To overcome this problem, we propose a cross‐language sentence/passage level text reuse corpus for the English‐Urdu language pair. The Cross‐Language English‐Urdu Corpus (CLEU) has source text in English whereas the derived text is in Urdu. It contains in total 3,235 sentence/passage pairs manually tagged into three categories that is near copy, paraphrased copy, and independently written. Further, as a second contribution, we evaluate the Translation plus Mono‐lingual Analysis method using three sets of experiments on the proposed dataset to highlight its usefulness. Evaluation results (f1=0.732 binary, f1=0.552 ternary classification) indicate that it is harder to detect cross‐language real cases of text reuse, especially when the language pairs have unrelated scripts. The corpus is a useful benchmark resource for the future development and assessment of cross‐language text reuse detection systems for the English‐Urdu language pair

Measuring Short Text Reuse For The Urdu Language

Text reuse occurs when one borrows the text (either verbatim or paraphrased) from an earlier written text. A large and increasing amount of digital text is easily and readily available, making it simpler to reuse but difficult to detect. As a result, automatic detection of text reuse has attracted the attention of the research community due to the wide variety of applications associated with it. To develop and evaluate automatic methods for text reuse detection, standard evaluation resources are required. In this work, we propose one such resource for a significantly under-resourced language - Urdu, which is widely used in day to day communication and has a large digital footprint particularly in the Indian subcontinent. Our proposed Urdu Short Text Reuse Corpus contains 2,684 short Urdu text pairs, manually labelled as verbatim (496), paraphrased (1,329), and independently written (859). In addition, we describe an evaluation of the corpus using various state-of-the-art text reuse detection methods with binary and multi-classification settings and a set of four classifiers. Output results show that Character n-gram Overlap using J48 classifier outperform other methods for the Urdu short text reuse detection task

Epidemiology, Zoonotic and Reverse Zoonotic Potential of COVID-19

The demographic patterns of COVID-19 spread can provide clues to develop roadmaps for devising better prevention and control. It is high time to analyze and re-evaluate the zoonotic/reverse zoonotic spread of SARS-CoV-2 globally. To this end, lessons from epidemiology and associated determinants from previous outbreaks of SARS-CoV-1 and MERS need to be cultured and re-visited. Ways to minimize the rates of infection and promote the well-being of the masses need urgent attention owing to the subsequent waves of the global pandemic in most countries. Efforts are being directed for the provision of efficient and cost-effective diagnostics, prophylaxis and therapeutic options for COVID-19. The chapter provides insights, suggesting a potential roadmap for efficiently preventing the future outbreaks of COVID-19, based on the tools of epidemiology, transmission probabilities and public health safety concerns

Multiepitope-based subunit vaccine design and evaluation against respiratory syncytial virus using reverse vaccinology approach

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is primarily associated with respiratory disorders globally. Despite the availability of information, there is still no competitive vaccine available for RSV. Therefore, the present study has been designed to develop a multiepitope-based subunit vaccine (MEV) using a reverse vaccinology approach to curb RSV infections. Briefly, two highly antigenic and conserved proteins of RSV (glycoprotein and fusion protein) were selected and potential epitopes of different categories (B-cell and T-cell) were identified from them. Eminently antigenic and overlapping epitopes, which demonstrated strong associations with their respective human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles and depicted collective ~70% coverage of the world’s populace, were shortlisted. Finally, 282 amino acids long MEV construct was established by connecting 13 major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class-I with two MHC class-II epitopes with appropriate adjuvant and linkers. Adjuvant and linkers were added to increase the immunogenic stimulation of the MEV. Developed MEV was stable, soluble, non-allergenic, non-toxic, flexible and highly antigenic. Furthermore, molecular docking and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations analyses were carried out. Results have shown a firm and robust binding affinity of MEV with human pathogenic toll-like receptor three (TLR3). The computationally mediated immune response of MEV demonstrated increased interferon-γ production, a significant abundance of immunoglobulin and activation of macrophages which are essential for immune-response against RSV. Moreover, MEV codons were optimized and in silico cloning was performed, to ensure its increased expression. These outcomes proposed that the MEV developed in this study will be a significant candidate against RSV to control and prevent RSV-related disorders if further investigated experimentally

Peptide vaccine against chikungunya virus: immuno-informatics combined with molecular docking approach

Abstract Background Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), causes massive outbreaks of chikungunya infection in several regions of Asia, Africa and Central/South America. Being positive sense RNA virus, CHIKV replication within the host resulting in its genome mutation and led to difficulties in creation of vaccine, drugs and treatment strategies. Vector control strategy has been a gold standard to combat spreading of CHIKV infection, but to eradicate a species from the face of earth is not an easy task. Therefore, alongside vector control, there is a dire need to prevent the infection through vaccine as well as through antiviral strategies. Methods This study was designed to find out conserved B cell and T cell epitopes of CHIKV structural proteins through immuno-informatics and computational approaches, which may play an important role in evoking the immune responses against CHIKV. Results Several conserved cytotoxic T-lymphocyte epitopes, linear and conformational B cell epitopes were predicted for CHIKV structural polyprotein and their antigenicity was calculated. Among B-cell epitopes “PPFGAGRPGQFGDI” showed a high antigenicity score and it may be highly immunogenic. In case of T cell epitopes, MHC class I peptides ‘TAECKDKNL’ and MHC class II peptides ‘VRYKCNCGG’ were found extremely antigenic. Conclusion The study led to the discovery of various epitopes, conserved among various strains belonging to different countries. The potential antigenic epitopes can be successfully utilized in designing novel vaccines for combating and eradication of CHIKV disease

Pharmacoinformatics and molecular dynamics simulation studies reveal potential covalent and FDA-approved inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 main protease 3CL(pro)

The SARS-CoV-2 was confirmed to cause the global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The 3-chymotrypsin-like protease (3CLpro), an essential enzyme for viral replication, is a valid target to combat SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. In this work, we present a structure-based study to identify potential covalent inhibitors containing a variety of chemical warheads. The targeted Asinex Focused Covalent (AFCL) library was screened based on different reaction types and potential covalent inhibitors were identified. In addition, we screened FDA-approved protease inhibitors to find candidates to be repurposed against SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro. A number of compounds with significant covalent docking scores were identified. These compounds were able to establish a covalent bond (C-S) with the reactive thiol group of Cys145 and to form favorable interactions with residues lining the substrate-binding site. Moreover, paritaprevir and simeprevir from FDA-approved protease inhibitors were identified as potential inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro. The mechanism and dynamic stability of binding between the identified compounds and SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro were characterized by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The identified compounds are potential inhibitors worthy of further development as COVID-19 drugs. Importantly, the identified FDA-approved anti-hepatitis-C virus (HCV) drugs paritaprevir and simeprevir could be ready for clinical trials to treat infected patients and help curb COVID-19. Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.status: publishe