Debbie, the Debate Bot of the Future

Chatbots are a rapidly expanding application of dialogue systems with companies switching to bot services for customer support, and new applications for users interested in casual conversation. One style of casual conversation is argument, many people love nothing more than a good argument. Moreover, there are a number of existing corpora of argumentative dialogues, annotated for agreement and disagreement, stance, sarcasm and argument quality. This paper introduces Debbie, a novel arguing bot, that selects arguments from conversational corpora, and aims to use them appropriately in context. We present an initial working prototype of Debbie, with some preliminary evaluation and describe future work.Comment: IWSDS 201

Summarizing Dialogic Arguments from Social Media

Online argumentative dialog is a rich source of information on popular beliefs and opinions that could be useful to companies as well as governmental or public policy agencies. Compact, easy to read, summaries of these dialogues would thus be highly valuable. A priori, it is not even clear what form such a summary should take. Previous work on summarization has primarily focused on summarizing written texts, where the notion of an abstract of the text is well defined. We collect gold standard training data consisting of five human summaries for each of 161 dialogues on the topics of Gay Marriage, Gun Control and Abortion. We present several different computational models aimed at identifying segments of the dialogues whose content should be used for the summary, using linguistic features and Word2vec features with both SVMs and Bidirectional LSTMs. We show that we can identify the most important arguments by using the dialog context with a best F-measure of 0.74 for gun control, 0.71 for gay marriage, and 0.67 for abortion.Comment: Proceedings of the 21th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 2017

Methotrexate induced accelerated nodulosis

Methotrexate induced accelerated nodulosis (MIAN) is a rare but unique side effect of methotrexate therapy. There is paucity of data from our country about this entity. We analyzed 14 cases of MIAN and studied its association with gender, rheumatoid factor positivity and dose and duration of methotrexate. Fourteen patients (8 females), 12 with rheumatoid arthritis (8 seropositive), one each with juvenile idiopathic (JIA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA) were detected to have MIAN during study period. All the patients presented with acute onset of multiple nodules. Radial border of fingers was the most commonly involved site. Disease was inactive in all but two patients at the time of appearance of MIAN. There was no association of MIAN with gender, rheumatoid factor positivity, disease duration, cumulative dose and duration of methotrexate therapy. Two patients each were treated with colchicine, D-penicillamine or hydroxy-chloroquine for 3-6 months without any response. We conclude that MIAN is a benign side effect of methotrexate treatment

Outcome in patients with enthesitis related arthritis (ERA): juvenile arthritis damage index (JADI) and functional status

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Data on outcome of ERA is scarce and there is lack of well-accepted tools. JADI is a newly described outcome measure in JIA that has not been evaluated in ERA. We studied outcome in ERA using JADI and correlated it with traditional outcome measures.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We studied 49 consecutive patients of ERA with age ≥ 5 years and duration ≥ 1 year. Along with JADI, we recorded enthesitis, lumbar spinal anterior flexion by modified Schober's method, presence of inflammatory backache, loss of school years, HAQ-S, growth and pubertal delay. Parent's/patient's and physician's global assessments on 100 mm visual analogue scale.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The median age was 18.0 (10–27) years and the median duration of disease was 6.0 (1–17) years. All the patients were male and half (53.1%) were HLA B 27 positive. Fourteen had decreased anterior lumbar flexion movement and 32 had inflammatory backache. Active enthesitis was present in 63.3%. Functionally, mild, moderate and severe disability was seen in 18.4%, 34.7% & 14.3% respectively. Sixty five percent of patients lost education years. Twenty-eight patients had damaged joints with median of 2.0 joints (0–9). Seventeen patients (34.7%) had damaged joints in JADI-A score with a median of 1.0 (0–12). Growth failure was the commonest extra articular damage (8.2%) in JADI-E. JADI correlated with HAQ-S, parent's or patient's & physician's global assessment (p < 0.01). Limitation of spinal mobility had high correlation with HAQ-S; correlation with JADI-A was low.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Three fourth of the ERA patients had functional limitations. Half of the patients had damaged joints. Even though JADI correlated well with traditional outcome measures, it underestimates joint damage, and does not assess enthesitis and spinal limitation which affect functional status in ERA. Inclusion of these may make it more useful for ERA.</p