Multi task learning and incorporating common sense knowledge for question answering

Question Answering (QA) system is an automated approach to retrieve correct responses to the questions asked by human in natural language. Reading comprehension (RC)in contrast to information retrieval, requires integrating information and reasoning about events, entities, and their relations across a full document. Immense progress has been made in the recent years for this task, since the advent of deep learning and use of sequence to sequence models for NLP. This thesis deals with two complex tasks in Question Answering with their own inherent challenges: Multi Task Learning for Narrative Question Answering, which involves developing models to deal with the complexity of the domain of stories, movie scripts and human written answers, and second task is to develop novel ways of incorporating common sense knowledge from external knowledge bases for automated question answering. The models developed for these tasks help to advance research in the area of question answering and highlights some of the shortcomings of the methods proposed in literature

Bring Your Own KG: Self-Supervised Program Synthesis for Zero-Shot KGQA

We present BYOKG, a universal question-answering (QA) system that can operate on any knowledge graph (KG), requires no human-annotated training data, and can be ready to use within a day -- attributes that are out-of-scope for current KGQA systems. BYOKG draws inspiration from the remarkable ability of humans to comprehend information present in an unseen KG through exploration -- starting at random nodes, inspecting the labels of adjacent nodes and edges, and combining them with their prior world knowledge. In BYOKG, exploration leverages an LLM-backed symbolic agent that generates a diverse set of query-program exemplars, which are then used to ground a retrieval-augmented reasoning procedure to predict programs for arbitrary questions. BYOKG is effective over both small- and large-scale graphs, showing dramatic gains in QA accuracy over a zero-shot baseline of 27.89 and 58.02 F1 on GrailQA and MetaQA, respectively. On GrailQA, we further show that our unsupervised BYOKG outperforms a supervised in-context learning method, demonstrating the effectiveness of exploration. Lastly, we find that performance of BYOKG reliably improves with continued exploration as well as improvements in the base LLM, notably outperforming a state-of-the-art fine-tuned model by 7.08 F1 on a sub-sampled zero-shot split of GrailQA

Entity Linking and Discovery via Arborescence-based Supervised Clustering

Previous work has shown promising results in performing entity linking by measuring not only the affinities between mentions and entities but also those amongst mentions. In this paper, we present novel training and inference procedures that fully utilize mention-to-mention affinities by building minimum arborescences (i.e., directed spanning trees) over mentions and entities across documents in order to make linking decisions. We also show that this method gracefully extends to entity discovery, enabling the clustering of mentions that do not have an associated entity in the knowledge base. We evaluate our approach on the Zero-Shot Entity Linking dataset and MedMentions, the largest publicly available biomedical dataset, and show significant improvements in performance for both entity linking and discovery compared to identically parameterized models. We further show significant efficiency improvements with only a small loss in accuracy over previous work, which use more computationally expensive models.Comment: Updated reference

Papillary carcinoma breast in male patient - A rare presentation

Introduction - Male breast carcinoma is rare, accounting for 1% of all malignancies in men and around 1% of all cases of breast carcinoma. Intracystic papillary carcinoma accounts for 0.5–1% of all breast cancers. It generally has good prognosis in women with almost 100% reported 10 year survival rate.Similar data for male patients is not available as the disease is extremely rare.Presentation of Case - A 52 year-old male patient presented with a swelling in his left breast. Swelling had gradually increased in size. On examination, a well-circumscribed swelling was palpable in retro aerolar region with nipple retraction. Mass was not fixed to underlying pectoralis muscle.A large mobile axillary lymph node was palpable. Fine needle aspiration was done, which reported “atypical ductal hyperplasia”. A core biopsy was done which displayed features of intracystic papillary carcinoma. A left modified radical mastectomy was carried out with axillary dissection. The biopsy report of the specimen confirmed the diagnosis of intracystic papillary carcinoma, tumor deposits were seen in lymph nodes. Adjuvant chemotherapy was given postoperatively. Patient recovered well.Conclusion - Intracystic papillary carcinoma is a rare malignancy of breast .It carries an excellent prognosis with upto 100% ten years survival rates reported in females.Surgery with chemotherapy has remained mainstay of treatment but due to rarity of the male breast cancer as such and Intracystic papillary carcinoma in particular, there are no clear guidelines for its management. Further analysis of this disease is needed for its better understanding and management.

Nationwide Trends in Inpatient Admissions of Pulmonary Hypertension in the United States from 2000 to 2013

Introduction: Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) is a disorder of the pulmonary vasculature with high mortality and bears a large economic burden on the healthcare system. We conducted a review of the largest inpatient database in the United States and analyzed the trends in hospitalizations due to PH from the turn of the century (2000) to 2013 to evaluate the rate of hospitalizations and determine the cost and mortality associated with PH. Material and methods: We analyzed the National Inpatient Sample Database (NIS) for all patients in which PH (Primary or Secondary) or cor pulmonale was the primary discharge diagnosis (ICD-9: 416.0, 416.8 and 416.9) from 2000 to 2013. The NIS is the largest all-payer inpatient database in the United States and contains data from approximately 8 million hospital stays each year. The statistical significance of the difference in the number of hospital discharges, lengths of stays and associated hospital costs over the study period was calculated. Results: In 2000, there were 12,066 hospital admissions with the principal discharge diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension, which increased to 13,605 admissions in 2013 (p \u3c 0.001). The mean length of stay for PH increased from 5.89 days to 6.67 days during this period (p = 0.04). During the same period, the hospital charges increase by 174.5% from US$24,973 in 2000 to US$ 68,545 in 2013 (Adjusted for inflation). The aggregate cost of hospital visits of a patient increased by 209.5% from US$301,324,218 in 2000 to US$ 932,554,725 in 2013. Conclusion: The number of inpatient discharges related to PH has increased even though the number of inpatient discharges with PAH has been reported to be lower in literature. The mean length of stay has also shown a mild increase. This increase is associated with a significant increase in the mean and aggregate cost. These inpatient costs associated with PH contribute significantly to the total healthcare burden. Further research on cost-effective evaluation and management of PH is required

Nationwide trends in inpatient admissions of pulmonary hypertension in the United States from 2000 to 2013

  INTRODUCTION: Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a disorder of the pulmonary vasculature with high mortality and bears a large economic burden on the healthcare system. We conducted a review of the largest inpatient database in the United States and analyzed the trends in hospitalizations due to PH from the turn of the century (2000) to 2013 to evaluate the rate of hospitalizations and determine the cost and mortality associated with PH. MATERIAL AND METHODS: We analyzed the National Inpatient Sample Database (NIS) for all patients in which PH (Primary or Secondary) or cor pulmonale was the primary discharge diagnosis (ICD-9: 416.0, 416.8 and 416.9) from 2000 to 2013. The NIS is the largest all-payer inpatient database in the United States and contains data from approximately 8 million hospital stays each year. The statistical significance of the difference in the number of hospital discharges, lengths of stays and associated hospital costs over the study period was calculated. RESULTS: In 2000, there were 12,066 hospital admissions with the principal discharge diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension, which increased to 13,605 admissions in 2013 (p < 0.001). The mean length of stay for PH increased from 5.89 days to 6.67 days during this period (p = 0.04). During the same period, the hospital charges increase by 174.5% from US$24,973 in 2000 to US$ 68,545 in 2013 (Adjusted for inflation). The aggregate cost of hospital visits of a patient increased by 209.5% from US$301,324,218 in 2000 to US$ 932,554,725 in 2013. CONCLUSIONS: The number of inpatient discharges related to PH has increased even though the number of inpatient discharges with PAH has been reported to be lower in literature. The mean length of stay has also shown a mild increase. This increase is associated with a significant increase in the mean and aggregate cost. These inpatient costs associated with PH contribute significantly to the total healthcare burden. Further research on cost-effective evaluation and management of PH is required.

Arthroscopic anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction using single bundle hamstring tendon autograft

Background: The present study was designed to analyze the postoperative outcome of arthroscopic anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction with anatomical single bundle hamstring tendons autograft fixed in femoral tunnel using endobutton and in the tibial tunnel using interference screws and reinforced by anterior half of peroneus longus tendon (AHPLT), wherever required.Methods: 39 patients of complete ACL tear underwent arthroscopic anatomical single bundle ACL reconstruction using quadrupled hamstring tendon autograft. It was ensured that the quadrupled graft had a length of at least 7 cm and thickness of at least 8 mm. If either of these requirements were not met, then the graft was supplemented by AHPLT. For functional assessment, international knee documentation committee (IKDC) knee score was taken and clinical tests for antero-posterior stability were done. In addition, the foot and ankle disability index (FADI) scores were used to evaluate the ankle donor site of the AHPLT.Results: The average graft diameter was 8.74 mm and average graft length was 9.12 cm. There was significant improvement in post op IKDC score when compared with pre op score. There was no antero-posterior instability seen in any of the patients during follow up. 10 patients required an additional graft augmentation with AHPLT. There was no complaint about weakness of the ankle joint after surgery.Conclusions: Arthroscopic ACL reconstruction with anatomical single bundle hamstring tendon autograft is an excellent treatment option for ACL deficient knees. It gives excellent functional outcome with minimal complications. Graft if small in diameter can be reinforced by AHPLT without any detrimental effect on ankle function

Functional outcome of comminuted upper metaphyseal tibial fracture treated with circular external fixators

Background: High speed motor vehicle accidents are on the rise over the past few years. These are responsible for most of the complex fractures of the tibial metaphysic. Proper treatment of these fractures is of paramount importance. The use of circular fixators for the definitive treatment of such fractures entails a minimally invasive technique of insertion that gives good fracture reduction and stability combined with minimal postoperative complications.Methods: This study was prospective and conducted over 22 patients diagnosed with upper comminuted metaphyseal tibial fracture treated with circular external fixator.Results: In this series, all 22 patients (100%) were male. Fourteen cases (64%) involved the left tibia and eight (36%) fractures were on right. The mean patient age was 49.5 years (range 26-75). Road traffic collisions accounted for most of the injuries (n=14), while fall from bike (n=8). In this study, using knee society score evaluation, excellent results (KSS>80) were seen in 8 patients (36.36%), good results (KSS 70-79) were seen in 10 patients (45.45%), fair (KSS 60-69) in 4 patient (18.18%) and poor (KSS< 60) in 0 patient (0%). Complication seen was pin tract infection in 2 patients (9.9%), which was managed by regular pin site dressings. Another complication was non-union in 1 patient (4.54%). No other complication was encountered.Conclusions: Circular external fixation is a promising modality for surgical treatment of comminuted upper metaphyseal tibial fractures. It allows satisfactory realignment of the fractured fragments and their stabilization, besides early mobilization of the joints and care of associated soft tissue injuries, without significant complications