4 research outputs found
A Large-Scale Comparative Study of Accurate COVID-19 Information versus Misinformation
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an infodemic where an overwhelming amount of
COVID-19 related content was being disseminated at high velocity through social
media. This made it challenging for citizens to differentiate between accurate
and inaccurate information about COVID-19. This motivated us to carry out a
comparative study of the characteristics of COVID-19 misinformation versus
those of accurate COVID-19 information through a large-scale computational
analysis of over 242 million tweets. The study makes comparisons alongside four
key aspects: 1) the distribution of topics, 2) the live status of tweets, 3)
language analysis and 4) the spreading power over time. An added contribution
of this study is the creation of a COVID-19 misinformation classification
dataset. Finally, we demonstrate that this new dataset helps improve
misinformation classification by more than 9% based on average F1 measure
Comparison between parameter-efficient techniques and full fine-tuning: A case study on multilingual news article classification
Adapters and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are parameter-efficient fine-tuning
techniques designed to make the training of language models more efficient.
Previous results demonstrated that these methods can even improve performance
on some classification tasks. This paper complements the existing research by
investigating how these techniques influence the classification performance and
computation costs compared to full fine-tuning when applied to multilingual
text classification tasks (genre, framing, and persuasion techniques detection;
with different input lengths, number of predicted classes and classification
difficulty), some of which have limited training data. In addition, we conduct
in-depth analyses of their efficacy across different training scenarios
(training on the original multilingual data; on the translations into English;
and on a subset of English-only data) and different languages. Our findings
provide valuable insights into the applicability of the parameter-efficient
fine-tuning techniques, particularly to complex multilingual and multilabel
classification tasks
Effect of remote ischaemic conditioning on clinical outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI): a single-blind randomised controlled trial.
BACKGROUND: Remote ischaemic conditioning with transient ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm has been shown to reduce myocardial infarct size in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). We investigated whether remote ischaemic conditioning could reduce the incidence of cardiac death and hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months. METHODS: We did an international investigator-initiated, prospective, single-blind, randomised controlled trial (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI) at 33 centres across the UK, Denmark, Spain, and Serbia. Patients (age >18 years) with suspected STEMI and who were eligible for PPCI were randomly allocated (1:1, stratified by centre with a permuted block method) to receive standard treatment (including a sham simulated remote ischaemic conditioning intervention at UK sites only) or remote ischaemic conditioning treatment (intermittent ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm through four cycles of 5-min inflation and 5-min deflation of an automated cuff device) before PPCI. Investigators responsible for data collection and outcome assessment were masked to treatment allocation. The primary combined endpoint was cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months in the intention-to-treat population. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02342522) and is completed. FINDINGS: Between Nov 6, 2013, and March 31, 2018, 5401 patients were randomly allocated to either the control group (n=2701) or the remote ischaemic conditioning group (n=2700). After exclusion of patients upon hospital arrival or loss to follow-up, 2569 patients in the control group and 2546 in the intervention group were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. At 12 months post-PPCI, the Kaplan-Meier-estimated frequencies of cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure (the primary endpoint) were 220 (8·6%) patients in the control group and 239 (9·4%) in the remote ischaemic conditioning group (hazard ratio 1·10 [95% CI 0·91-1·32], p=0·32 for intervention versus control). No important unexpected adverse events or side effects of remote ischaemic conditioning were observed. INTERPRETATION: Remote ischaemic conditioning does not improve clinical outcomes (cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure) at 12 months in patients with STEMI undergoing PPCI. FUNDING: British Heart Foundation, University College London Hospitals/University College London Biomedical Research Centre, Danish Innovation Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, TrygFonden