We present a publicly available corpus with detailed annotations describing the core elements of clinical trials: Participants, Intervention, Control, and Outcomes. The corpus consists of 1011 abstracts of breast cancer randomized controlled trials extracted from the PubMed database. The corpus improves previous corpora by providing detailed annotations for outcomes to identify numeric texts that report the number of participants that experience specific outcomes. The corpus will be helpful for the development of systems for automatic extraction of data from randomized controlled trial literature to support evidence-based medicine. Additionally, we demonstrate the feasibility of the corpus by using two strong baselines for named entity recognition task. Most of the entities achieve F1 scores greater than 0.80 demonstrating the quality of the dataset.

Public opinion in social media is increasingly becoming a critical factor in pandemic control. Understanding the emotions of a population towards vaccinations and COVID-19 may be valuable in convincing members to become vaccinated. We investigated the emotions of Japanese Twitter users towards Tweets related to COVID-19 vaccination. Using the WRIME dataset, which provides emotion ratings for Japanese Tweets sourced from writers (Tweet posters) and readers, we fine-tuned a BERT model to predict levels of emotional intensity. This model achieved a training accuracy of MSE = 0.356. A separate dataset of 20,254 Japanese Tweets containing COVID-19 vaccine-related keywords was also collected, on which the fine-tuned BERT was used to perform emotion analysis. Afterwards, a correlation analysis between the extracted emotions and a set of vaccination measures in Japan was conducted.The results revealed that surprise and fear were the most intense emotions predicted by the model for writers and readers, respectively, on the vaccine-related Tweet dataset. The correlation analysis also showed that vaccinations were weakly positively correlated with predicted levels of writer joy, writer/reader anticipation, and writer/reader trust.

Fake news provokes many societal problems; therefore, there has been extensive research on fake news detection tasks to counter it. Many fake news datasets were constructed as resources to facilitate this task. Contemporary research focuses almost exclusively on the factuality aspect of the news. However, this aspect alone is insufficient to explain “fake news,” which is a complex phenomenon that involves a wide range of issues. To fully understand the nature of each instance of fake news, it is important to observe it from various perspectives, such as the intention of the false news disseminator, the harmfulness of the news to our society, and the target of the news. We propose a novel annotation scheme with fine-grained labeling based on detailed investigations of existing fake news datasets to capture these various aspects of fake news. Using the annotation scheme, we construct and publish the first Japanese fake news dataset. The annotation scheme is expected to provide an in-depth understanding of fake news. We plan to build datasets for both Japanese and other languages using our scheme. Our Japanese dataset is published at https://hkefka385.github.io/dataset/fakenews-japanese/.

Fake news causes significant damage to society. To deal with these fake news, several studies on building detection models and arranging datasets have been conducted. Most of the fake news datasets depend on a specific time period. Consequently, the detection models trained on such a dataset have difficulty detecting novel fake news generated by political changes and social changes; they may possibly result in biased output from the input, including specific person names and organizational names. We refer to this problem as Diachronic Bias because it is caused by the creation date of news in each dataset. In this study, we confirm the bias, especially proper nouns including person names, from the deviation of phrase appearances in each dataset. Based on these findings, we propose masking methods using Wikidata to mitigate the influence of person names and validate whether they make fake news detection models robust through experiments with in-domain and out-of-domain data.

Disease name recognition and normalization is a fundamental process in biomedical text mining. Recently, neural joint learning of both tasks has been proposed to utilize the mutual benefits. While this approach achieves high performance, disease concepts that do not appear in the training dataset cannot be accurately predicted. This study introduces a novel end-to-end approach that combines span representations with dictionary-matching features to address this problem. Our model handles unseen concepts by referring to a dictionary while maintaining the performance of neural network-based models. Experiments using two major datasaets demonstrate that our model achieved competitive results with strong baselines, especially for unseen concepts during training.

This paper presents a prototype of a chat room that detects offensive expressions in a video live streaming chat in real time. Focusing on Twitch, one of the most popular live streaming platforms, we created a dataset for the task of detecting offensive expressions. We collected 2,000 chat posts across four popular game titles with genre diversity (e.g., competitive, violent, peaceful). To make use of the similarity in offensive expressions among different social media platforms, we adopted state-of-the-art models trained on offensive expressions from Twitter for our Twitch data (i.e., transfer learning). We investigated two similarity measurements to predict the transferability, textual similarity, and game-genre similarity. Our results show that the transfer of features from social media to live streaming is effective. However, the two measurements show less correlation in the transferability prediction.

To date, various Twitter-based event detection systems have been proposed. Most of their targets, however, share common characteristics. They are seasonal or global events such as earthquakes and flu pandemics. In contrast, this study targets unseasonal and local disease events. Our system investigates the frequencies of disease-related words such as “nausea”,“chill”,and “diarrhea” and estimates the number of patients using regression of these word frequencies. Experiments conducted using Japanese 47 areas from January 2017 to April 2017 revealed that the detection of small and unseasonal event is extremely difficult (overall performance: 0.13). However, we found that the event scale and the detection performance show high correlation in the specified cases (in the phase of patient increasing or decreasing). The results also suggest that when 150 and more patients appear in a high population area, we can expect that our social sensors detect this outbreak. Based on these results, we can infer that social sensors can reliably detect unseasonal and local disease events under certain conditions, just as they can for seasonal or global events.

Because of the increasing popularity of social media, much information has been shared on the internet, enabling social media users to understand various real world events. Particularly, social media-based infectious disease surveillance has attracted increasing attention. In this work, we specifically examine influenza: a common topic of communication on social media. The fundamental theory of this work is that several words, such as symptom words (fever, headache, etc.), appear in advance of flu epidemic occurrence. Consequently, past word occurrence can contribute to estimation of the number of current patients. To employ such forecasting words, one can first estimate the optimal time lag for each word based on their cross correlation. Then one can build a linear model consisting of word frequencies at different time points for nowcasting and for forecasting influenza epidemics. Experimentally obtained results (using 7.7 million tweets of August 2012 – January 2016), the proposed model achieved the best nowcasting performance to date (correlation ratio 0.93) and practically sufficient forecasting performance (correlation ratio 0.91 in 1-week future prediction, and correlation ratio 0.77 in 3-weeks future prediction). This report is the first of the relevant literature to describe a model enabling prediction of future epidemics using Twitter.

In recent years, detecting Alzheimer disease (AD) in early stages based on natural language processing (NLP) has drawn much attention. To date, vocabulary size, grammatical complexity, and fluency have been studied using NLP metrics. However, the content analysis of AD narratives is still unreachable for NLP. This study investigates features of the words that AD patients use in their spoken language. After recruiting 18 examinees of 53–90 years old (mean: 76.89), they were divided into two groups based on MMSE scores. The AD group comprised 9 examinees with scores of 21 or lower. The healthy control group comprised 9 examinees with a score of 22 or higher. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) classified words were used to categorize the words that the examinees used. The word frequency was found from observation. Significant differences were confirmed for the usage of impersonal pronouns in the AD group. This result demonstrated the basic feasibility of the proposed NLP-based detection approach.