"Is depression related to cannabis?": A knowledge-infused model for Entity and Relation Extraction with Limited Supervision

With strong marketing advocacy of the benefits of cannabis use for improved mental health, cannabis legalization is a priority among legislators. However, preliminary scientific research does not conclusively associate cannabis with improved mental health. In this study, we explore the relationship between depression and consumption of cannabis in a targeted social media corpus involving personal use of cannabis with the intent to derive its potential mental health benefit. We use tweets that contain an association among three categories annotated by domain experts - Reason, Effect, and Addiction. The state-of-the-art Natural Langauge Processing techniques fall short in extracting these relationships between cannabis phrases and the depression indicators. We seek to address the limitation by using domain knowledge; specifically, the Drug Abuse Ontology for addiction augmented with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lexicons for mental health. Because of the lack of annotations due to the limited availability of the domain experts' time, we use supervised contrastive learning in conjunction with GPT-3 trained on a vast corpus to achieve improved performance even with limited supervision. Experimental results show that our method can significantly extract cannabis-depression relationships better than the state-of-the-art relation extractor. High-quality annotations can be provided using a nearest neighbor approach using the learned representations that can be used by the scientific community to understand the association between cannabis and depression better.Comment: Accepted to AAAI-2021 Symposiu

Is depression related to cannabis? : A Knowledge-infused Model for Entity and Relation Extraction with Limited Supervision

With strong marketing advocacy of the benefits of cannabis use for improved mental health, cannabis legalization is a priority among legislators. However, preliminary scientific research does not conclusively associate cannabis with improved mental health. In this study, we explore the relationship between depression and consumption of cannabis in a targeted social media corpus involving personal use of cannabis with the intent to derive its potential mental health benefit. We use tweets that contain an association among three categories annotated by domain experts - Reason, Effect, and Addiction. The state-of-the-art Natural Langauge Processing techniques fall short in extracting these relationships between cannabis phrases and the depression indicators. We seek to address the limitation by using domain knowledge; specifically, the Drug Abuse Ontology for addiction augmented with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lexicons for mental health. Because of the lack of annotations due to the limited availability of the domain experts’ time, we use supervised contrastive learning in conjunction with GPT-3 trained on a vast corpus to achieve improved performance even with limited supervision. Experimental results show that our method can significantly extract cannabis-depression relationships better than the state-of-the-art relation extractor. High-quality annotations can be provided using a nearest neighbor approach using the learned representations that can be used by the scientific community to understand the association between cannabis and depression better

Demo Alleviate: Demonstrating Artificial Intelligence Enabled Virtual Assistance for Telehealth: The Mental Health Case

After the pandemic, artificial intelligence (AI) powered support for mental health care has become increasingly important. The breadth and complexity of significant challenges required to provide adequate care involve: (a) Personalized patient understanding, (b) Safety-constrained and medically validated chatbot patient interactions, and (c) Support for continued feedback-based refinements in design using chatbot-patient interactions. We propose Alleviate, a chatbot designed to assist patients suffering from mental health challenges with personalized care and assist clinicians with understanding their patients better. Alleviate draws from an array of publicly available clinically valid mental-health texts and databases, allowing Alleviate to make medically sound and informed decisions. In addition, Alleviate\u27s modular design and explainable decision-making lends itself to robust and continued feedback-based refinements to its design. In this paper, we explain the different modules of Alleviate and submit a short video demonstrating Alleviate\u27s capabilities to help patients and clinicians understand each other better to facilitate optimal care strategies

sCrop: A Novel Device for Sustainable Automatic Disease Prediction, Crop Selection, and Irrigation in Internet-of-Agro-Things for Smart Agriculture

Accepted Manuscript version of an article introducing the innovative idea of the Internet-of-Agro-Things (IoAT) with an explanation of the automatic detection of plant disease for the development of Agriculture Cyber-Physical System (ACPS). An accuracy of 99.24% is achieved by the proposed plant disease prediction framework

The DistilBERT Model: A Promising Approach to Improve Machine Reading Comprehension Models

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is a challenging task in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), where a machine is required to read a given text passage and answer a set of questions based on it. This paper provides an overview of recent advances in MRC and highlights some of the key challenges and future directions of this research area. It also evaluates the performance of several baseline models on the dataset, evaluates the challenges that the dataset poses for existing MRC models, and introduces the DistilBERT model to improve the accuracy of the answer extraction process. The supervised paradigm for training machine reading and comprehension models represents a practical path forward for creating comprehensive natural language understanding systems. To enhance the DistilBERT basic model's functionality, we have experimented with a variety of question heads that differ in the number of layers, activation function, and general structure. DistilBERT is a model for question-resolution tasks that is successful and delivers state-of-the-art performance while requiring less computational resources than large models like BERT, according to the presented technique. We could enhance the model's functionality and obtain a better understanding of how the model functions by investigating other question head architectures. These findings could serve as a foundation for future study on how to make question-and-answer systems and other tasks connected to the processing of natural languages. &nbsp

Psychidemic: Measuring the Spatio-Temporal Psychological Impact of Novel Choronovirus with a Social Quality Index

Experts have warned about severe social and health consequences of COVID-19 on individuals and society, specifically Mental Health (Depression, Anxiety), Addiction (Substance-use), and Gender-based (or Domestic) Violence (GBV). Building upon past successful efforts involving social media big data analysis for epidemiology and public health research, such as drug abuse (leading to an FDA warning), mental health, harassment, and GBV, we undertook an analysis of greater than 800 million tweets and ~700,000 news articles related to COVID-19 to explore a variety of questions such as: Q1: How can we use social media to measure psychological and social impact in (near) real-time? Q2: How does intervention in the form of state-level policy choices and implementations relate to mental health and addiction-related behaviors across different states? What evidence is there for adaptive/coping behavior? Q3: How do GenZ and Millennials express themselves in the outbreak, particularly in the context of mental health and addiction? This research involves the use of the knowledge-infused natural language processing developed at the AI Institute. It involves infusing (deeply integrating) deep domain knowledge (e.g., mental health-related knowledge from DSM-5 and addition related knowledge captured by the Drug Abuse Ontology) with the deep learning techniques. Additional material is at: http://wiki.aiisc.ai/covid1

GEAR-Up: Generative AI and External Knowledge-based Retrieval Upgrading Scholarly Article Searches for Systematic Reviews

Systematic reviews (SRs) are pivotal yet time-intensive, often taking over a year to complete due to the vast volume of literature. Given the ever-increasing volume of published studies, applying existing computing and informatics technology can decrease this time and resource burden. Due to the revolutionary advances in (1) Generative AI such as ChatGPT, and (2) External knowledge-augmented information extraction efforts such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation. This paper explores using Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, and external knowledge-augmented information extraction, like Retrieval-Augmented Generation, to enhance SR efficiency. We introduce GEAR-Up, a system that automates query development and translation in SRs. It enriches user queries with additional context from language models and knowledge graphs, facilitating efficient article retrieval from scholarly databases. In collaboration with librarians, our qualitative evaluations show improved reproducibility and quality in search strategies. The demo is available at Systematic reviews (SRs) - the librarian-assisted literature survey of scholarly articles takes time and requires significant human resources. Given the ever-increasing volume of published studies, applying existing computing and informatics technology can decrease this time and resource burden. Due to the revolutionary advances in (1) Generative AI such as ChatGPT, and (2) External knowledge-augmented information extraction efforts such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation, In this work, we explore the use of techniques from (1) and (2) for SR. We demonstrate a system that takes user queries, performs query expansion to obtain enriched context (includes additional terms and definitions by querying language models and knowledge graphs), and uses this context to search for articles on scholarly databases to retrieve articles. We perform qualitative evaluations of our system through comparison against sentinel (ground truth) articles provided by an in-house librarian. The demo can be found at: https://youtu.be/zMdP56GJ9mU

Explainable Pathfinding for Inscrutable Planners with Inductive Logic Programming

The complexity of the solutions that artificial intelligence can learn to solve problems currently surpasses its ability to explain these solutions. In many domains, explainable solutions are a necessary condition while optimality is not. Therefore, we seek to constrain solutions to the space of solutions that can be explained to a human. To do this, we build on inductive logic programming (ILP) techniques that allow us to define robust background knowledge and inductive biases. By combining ILP with a given inscrutable planner, we are able to construct an explainable graph representing solutions to all states in the state space. This graph can then be summarized using a variety of methods such as hierarchical representations and simple if/else rules. We test our approach on Towers of Hanoi and discuss future work for applications to the Rubik’s cube