Retrieval and Generative Approaches for a Pregnancy Chatbot in Nepali with Stemmed and Non-Stemmed Data : A Comparative Study

The field of Natural Language Processing which involves the use of artificial intelligence to support human languages has seen tremendous growth due to its high-quality features. Its applications such as language translation, chatbots, virtual assistants, search autocomplete, and autocorrect are widely used in various domains including healthcare, advertising, customer service, and target advertising. To provide pregnancy-related information a health domain chatbot has been proposed and this work explores two different NLP-based approaches for developing the chatbot. The first approach is a multiclass classification-based retrieval approach using BERTbased multilingual BERT and multilingual DistilBERT while the other approach employs a transformer-based generative chatbot for pregnancy-related information. The performance of both stemmed and non-stemmed datasets in Nepali language has been analyzed for each approach. The experimented results indicate that BERT-based pre-trained models perform well on non-stemmed data whereas scratch transformer models have better performance on stemmed data. Among the models tested the DistilBERT model achieved the highest training and validation accuracy and testing accuracy of 0.9165 on the retrieval-based model architecture implementation on the non-stemmed dataset. Similarly, in the generative approach architecture implementation with transformer 1 gram BLEU and 2 gram BLEU scores of 0.3570 and 0.1413 respectively were achieved.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables. In proceedings of the International Conference on Technologies for Computer, Electrical, Electronics & Communication (ICT-CEEL 2023), Bhaktapur, Nepa

Effects of plant growth regulators on growth, flowering, fruiting and fruit yield of cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.): A review

This review provides a comprehensive overview of the basic and applied aspects of different plant growth regulators in the regulation of growth and development of cucumber plants. The study is completely based on the use of secondary sources of data; related journals, government institutes, and relevant reports. Foliar application of PGRs has been shown to change the physiological and developmental processes, including plant vegetative growth, sex expression, yield, and yield components in cucumber. There are basically two types of growth regulators; plant growth promoters such as auxin, gibberellins, cytokinins, maleic hydrazide, ethephon, etc. and plant growth inhibitors such as ethylene, abscisic acids, dormins, etc. The combined use of auxins and gibberellins result in increased secondary growth. Maleic hydrazide (MH) along with Ethephon at 100 ppm each increases the number of nodes and primary branches.  Ethrel at 300-400 ppm retards the secondary development and increase femaleness, and at 200-300 ppm make fruit surface smooth. Silver nitrate (AgNO3) at 400 ppm enhances the maleness in cucumber. Application of Ethephon at 300 ppm reduces the harvesting time of the fruit. Salicylic acid (at 2 doses of 0.07 mm/l + 0.18 mm/l) increases chlorophyll content and its exogenous application increases the fruit yield. Maleic Hydrazide (MH) alone at 100 ppm increases the femaleness, inhibits apical growth at 50-100 ppm, and increases fruit size at 200 ppm. Therefore, various auxin [indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), NAA], auxin transport inhibitor (TIBA), cytokinins (KIN), gibberellin [gibberellic acid (GA3)], ABA, ethylene [(2-chloroethylphosphonic acid (ethrel; ethephon; CEPA)] and growth retardant (MH) have been applied to control the vegetative growth and to maximize yield of cucumber. Numerous obstacles have hindered the quality cucumber production in Nepal; like environmental stresses, biotic and abiotic constraints, pest and disease outbreaks, and many others. The use of exogenous plant growth regulators has been crucial to Nepali cucumber producers as plant growth regulators has hasty effect on vegetative as well as the quality yield of plants. This study aims to reveal the suitable concentrations for the applications of growth regulators so that the use of such regulators is environmentally and toxicologically safe for both plants and the consumers

Prevalence of anemia and mortality among anemic patients with COVID-19 in a tertiary care setting in Nepal

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic first detected in December 2019 has claimed so many lives globally as well as in Nepal. Inflammatory changes in SARS-CoV-2 infection can lead to anemia. This study aims to find the prevalence of anemia and mortality among anemic patients in COVID patients admitted to a tertiary care centre in Nepal. Method: A descriptive cross-sectional study with data collected retrospectively between May 2021 to February 2022 on patients with proven COVID-19 admitted to Patan Hospital. Result: Among 890, anemia was prevalent in 296(33.25%) (CI 95%, 30.17-36.35) patients which was more among the female population. The mean hemoglobin was 10.68±1.62 g/dl in anemic patients. Mild anemia was present in 215(72.6%) patients followed by moderate in 64(21.6%) patients and severe in 17(5.8%) patients. The mortality in anemic patients was 43(14.5%). Conclusion: One third of COVID-19 patients admitted to Patan Hospital had anemia which was found to be similar to studies done in similar setting. One in four COVID-19 patients with anemia had died was found to be lower than other studies done in similar settings

Characterization of CA-MRSA TCH1516 exposed to nafcillin in bacteriological and physiological media

Design Type(s)replicate design • transcription profiling design • sequence analysis objectiveMeasurement Type(s)transcription profiling assay • cellular morphology • exo-metabolome • growthTechnology Type(s)RNA sequencing • fluorescence microscopy • liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry • high performance liquid chromatography • Optical Density MeasurementFactor Type(s)culture medium • biological replicate • experimental conditionSample Characteristic(s)Staphylococcus aureus • culturing environment Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data (ISA-Tab format