Self-Adaptive Named Entity Recognition by Retrieving Unstructured Knowledge

Although named entity recognition (NER) helps us to extract domain-specific entities from text (e.g., artists in the music domain), it is costly to create a large amount of training data or a structured knowledge base to perform accurate NER in the target domain. Here, we propose self-adaptive NER, which retrieves external knowledge from unstructured text to learn the usages of entities that have not been learned well. To retrieve useful knowledge for NER, we design an effective two-stage model that retrieves unstructured knowledge using uncertain entities as queries. Our model predicts the entities in the input and then finds those of which the prediction is not confident. Then, it retrieves knowledge by using these uncertain entities as queries and concatenates the retrieved text to the original input to revise the prediction. Experiments on CrossNER datasets demonstrated that our model outperforms strong baselines by 2.35 points in F1 metric.Comment: EACL2023 (long

Graphene oxide scaffold accelerates cellular proliferative response and alveolar bone healing of tooth extraction socket

Graphene oxide (GO) consisting of a carbon monolayer has been widely investigated for tissue engineering platforms because of its unique properties. For this study, we fabricated a GO-applied scaffold and assessed the cellular and tissue behaviors in the scaffold. A preclinical test was conducted to ascertain whether the GO scaffold promoted bone induction in dog tooth extraction sockets. For this study, GO scaffolds were prepared by coating the surface of a collagen sponge scaffold with 0.1 and 1 μg/mL GO dispersion. Scaffolds were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), physical testing, cell seeding, and rat subcutaneous implant testing. Then a GO scaffold was implanted into a dog tooth extraction socket. Histological observations were made at 2 weeks postsurgery. SEM observations show that GO attached to the surface of collagen scaffold struts. The GO scaffold exhibited an interconnected structure resembling that of control subjects. GO application improved the physical strength, enzyme resistance, and adsorption of calcium and proteins. Cytocompatibility tests showed that GO application significantly increased osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 cell proliferation. In addition, an assessment of rat subcutaneous tissue response revealed that implantation of 1 μg/mL GO scaffold stimulated cellular ingrowth behavior, suggesting that the GO scaffold exhibited good biocompatibility. The tissue ingrowth area and DNA contents of 1 μg/mL GO scaffold were, respectively, approximately 2.5-fold and 1.4-fold greater than those of the control. Particularly, the infiltration of ED2-positive (M2) macrophages and blood vessels were prominent in the GO scaffold. Dog bone-formation tests showed that 1 μg/mL GO scaffold implantation enhanced bone formation. New bone formation following GO scaffold implantation was enhanced fivefold compared to that in control subjects. These results suggest that GO was biocompatible and had high bone-formation capability for the scaffold. The GO scaffold is expected to be beneficial for bone tissue engineering therapy