Findings of the WMT 2017 Biomedical Translation Shared Task

Automatic translation of documents is an important task in many domains, including the biological and clinical domains. The second edition of the Biomedical Translation task in the Conference of Machine Translation focused on the automatic translation of biomedical-related documents between English and various European languages. This year, we addressed ten languages: Czech, German, English, French, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian and Swedish. Test sets included both scientific publications (from the Scielo and EDP Sciences databases) and health-related news (from the Cochrane and UK National Health Service web sites). Seven teams participated in the task, submitting a total of 82 runs. Herein we describe the test sets, participating systems and results of both the automatic and manual evaluation of the translations

Using systems medicine to identify a therapeutic agent with potential for repurposing in inflammatory bowel disease

ObjectiveInflammatory bowel diseases cause significant morbidity and mortality. Aberrant NF-κB signalling is strongly associated with these conditions, and several established drugs influence the NF-κB signalling network to exert their effect. This study aimed to identify drugs which alter NF-κB signalling and may be repositioned for use in inflammatory bowel disease.DesignThe SysmedIBD consortium established a novel drug-repurposing pipeline based on a combination of in-silico drug discovery and biological assays targeted at demonstrating an impact on NF-kappaB signalling, and a murine model of IBD.ResultsThe drug discovery algorithm identified several drugs already established in IBD, including corticosteroids. The highest-ranked drug was the macrolide antibiotic Clarithromycin, which has previously been reported to have anti-inflammatory effects in aseptic conditions. Clarithromycin's effects were validated in several experiments: it influenced NF-κB mediated transcription in murine peritoneal macrophages and intestinal enteroids; it suppressed NF-κB protein shuttling in murine reporter enteroids; it suppressed NF-κB (p65) DNA binding in the small intestine of mice exposed to LPS, and it reduced the severity of dextran sulphate sodium-induced colitis in C57BL/6 mice. Clarithromycin also suppressed NF-κB (p65) nuclear translocation in human intestinal enteroids.ConclusionsThese findings demonstrate that in-silico drug repositioning algorithms can viably be allied to laboratory validation assays in the context of inflammatory bowel disease; and that further clinical assessment of clarithromycin in the management of inflammatory bowel disease is required

Findings of the WMT 2018 Biomedical Translation Shared Task: Evaluation on Medline test sets

Machine translation enables the automatic translation of textual documents between languages and can facilitate access to information only available in a given language for non-speakers of this language, e.g. research results presented in scientific publications. In this paper, we provide an overview of the Biomedical Translation shared task in the Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT) 2018, which specifically examined the performance of machine translation systems for biomedical texts. This year, we provided test sets of scientific publications from two sources (EDP and Medline) and for six language pairs (English with each of Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish). We describe the development of the various test sets, the submissions that we received and the evaluations that we carried out. We obtained a total of 39 runs from six teams and some of this year's BLEU scores were somewhat higher that last year's, especially for teams that made use of biomedical resources or state-of-the-art MTalgorithms (e.g. Transformer). Finally, our manual evaluation scored automatic translations higher than the reference translations for German and Spanish

Findings of the WMT 2018 Biomedical Translation Shared Task: Evaluation on Medline test sets

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Chromophore containing bipyridyl ligands: part 1, supramolecular solid-state structure of Ag(I) complexes

The solid-state structures of a series of azine or azo chromophore containing bipyridyl ligand complexes of Ag(I) salts have been determined by single-crystal X-ray diffraction. The supramolecular structures are dominated by one-dimensional chains formed through pyridyl-Ag-pyridyl bonding, but the packing of these chains through non-covalent intermolecular interactions is unpredictable. Ag anion interactions are shown to be important, especially for nitrate and perchlorate species, but these may be supported or replaced by Ag Ag, Ag solvent, Ag azine or Ag p contacts. The molecular structures of the ligands show little alteration on complex formation, except for the AgNO3 complex of N,N0-bis-pyridin-4-ylmethylenehydrazine where the normally planar azine ligand adopts a twisted geometry