Search

Over the last few years Literature-based Discovery (LBD) has regained popularity as a means to enhance the scientific research process. The resurgent interest has spurred the development of supervised and semi-supervised machine learning models aimed at making previously implicit connections between scientific concepts/entities within often extensive bodies of literature explicit—i.e., suggesting novel scientific hypotheses. In doing so, understanding the temporally evolving interactions between these entities can provide valuable information for predicting the future development of entity relationships. However, existing methods often underutilize the latent information embedded in the temporal aspects of the interaction data. Motivated by applications in the food domain—where we aim to connect nutritional information with health-related benefits—we address the hypothesis-generation problem using a temporal graph-based approach. Given that hypothesis generation involves predicting future (i.e., still to be discovered) entity connections, in our view the ability to capture the dynamic evolution of connections over time is pivotal for a robust model. To address this, we introduce THiGER, a novel batch contrastive temporal node-pair embedding method. THiGER excels in providing a more expressive node-pair encoding by effectively harnessing node-pair relationships. Furthermore, we present THiGER-A, an incremental training approach that incorporates an active curriculum learning strategy to mitigate label bias arising from unobserved connections. By progressively training on increasingly challenging and high-utility samples, our approach significantly enhances the performance of the embedding model. Empirical validation of our proposed method demonstrates its effectiveness on established temporal-graph benchmark datasets, as well as on real-world datasets within the food domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the ever-evolving domain of food computing, named entity recognition (NER) presents transformative potential that extends far beyond mere word tagging in recipes. Its implications encompass intelligent recipe recommendations, health analysis, and personalization. Nevertheless, existing NER models in food computing encounter challenges stemming from variations in recipe input standards, limited annotations, and dataset quality. This article addresses the specific problem of ingredient NER and introduces two innovative models: SINERA, an efficient and robust model, and SINERAS, a semi-supervised variant that leverages a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to learn from untagged ingredient list entries. To mitigate issues associated with data quality and availability in food computing, we introduce the ARTI dataset, a diverse and comprehensive repository of ingredient lines. Additionally, we identify and tackle a pervasive challenge—spurious correlations between entity positions and predictions. To address this, we propose a set of data augmentation rules tailored for food NER. Extensive evaluations conducted on the ARTI dataset and a revised TASTEset dataset underscore the performance of our models. They outperform several state-of-the-art benchmarks and rival the BERT model while maintaining smaller parameter sizes and reduced training times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]