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Heart failure is a syndrome which occurs when the heart is not able to pump blood and oxygen to support other organs in the body. Identifying the underlying themes in the diagnostic codes and procedure reports of patients admitted for heart failure could reveal the clinical phenotypes associated with heart failure and to group patients based on their similar characteristics which could also help in predicting patient outcomes like length of stay. These clinical phenotypes usually have a probabilistic latent structure and hence, as there has been no previous work on identifying phenotypes in clinical notes of heart failure patients using a probabilistic framework and to predict length of stay of these patients using data-driven artificial intelligence-based methods, we apply natural language processing technique, topic modeling, to identify the themes present in diagnostic codes and in procedure reports of 1,200 patients admitted for heart failure at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System (UI Health). Topic modeling identified twelve themes each in diagnostic codes and procedure reports which revealed information about different phenotypes related to various perspectives about heart failure, to study patients' profiles and to discover new relationships among medical concepts. Each theme had a set of keywords and each clinical note was labeled with two themes - one corresponding to its diagnostic code and the other corresponding to its procedure reports along with their percentage contribution. We used these themes and their percentage contribution to predict length of stay. We found that the themes discovered in diagnostic codes and procedure reports using topic modeling together were able to predict length of stay of the patients with an accuracy of 61.1% and an Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (ROC AUC) value of 0.828., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, Accepted as a regular full paper at IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DIGITAL HEALTH, 2023

Heart failure occurs when the heart is not able to pump blood and oxygen to support other organs in the body as it should. Treatments include medications and sometimes hospitalization. Patients with heart failure can have both cardiovascular as well as non-cardiovascular comorbidities. Clinical notes of patients with heart failure can be analyzed to gain insight into the topics discussed in these notes and the major comorbidities in these patients. In this regard, we apply machine learning techniques, such as topic modeling, to identify the major themes found in the clinical notes specific to the procedures performed on 1,200 patients admitted for heart failure at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System (UI Health). Topic modeling revealed five hidden themes in these clinical notes, including one related to heart disease comorbidities., Comment: 4 pages, 2 tables, accepted in IEEE EMBC 2022 conference (IEEE International Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference)

While there has been recent progress in abstractive summarization as applied to different domains including news articles, scientific articles, and blog posts, the application of these techniques to clinical text summarization has been limited. This is primarily due to the lack of large-scale training data and the messy/unstructured nature of clinical notes as opposed to other domains where massive training data come in structured or semi-structured form. Further, one of the least explored and critical components of clinical text summarization is factual accuracy of clinical summaries. This is specifically crucial in the healthcare domain, cardiology in particular, where an accurate summary generation that preserves the facts in the source notes is critical to the well-being of a patient. In this study, we propose a framework for improving the factual accuracy of abstractive summarization of clinical text using knowledge-guided multi-objective optimization. We propose to jointly optimize three cost functions in our proposed architecture during training: generative loss, entity loss and knowledge loss and evaluate the proposed architecture on 1) clinical notes of patients with heart failure (HF), which we collect for this study; and 2) two benchmark datasets, Indiana University Chest X-ray collection (IU X-Ray), and MIMIC-CXR, that are publicly available. We experiment with three transformer encoder-decoder architectures and demonstrate that optimizing different loss functions leads to improved performance in terms of entity-level factual accuracy., Comment: Accepted to EMBC 2022

As part of the large number of scientific articles being published every year, the publication rate of biomedical literature has been increasing. Consequently, there has been considerable effort to harness and summarize the massive amount of biomedical research articles. While transformer-based encoder-decoder models in a vanilla source document-to-summary setting have been extensively studied for abstractive summarization in different domains, their major limitations continue to be entity hallucination (a phenomenon where generated summaries constitute entities not related to or present in source article(s)) and factual inconsistency. This problem is exacerbated in a biomedical setting where named entities and their semantics (which can be captured through a knowledge base) constitute the essence of an article. The use of named entities and facts mined from background knowledge bases pertaining to the named entities to guide abstractive summarization has not been studied in biomedical article summarization literature. In this paper, we propose an entity-driven fact-aware framework for training end-to-end transformer-based encoder-decoder models for abstractive summarization of biomedical articles. We call the proposed approach, whose building block is a transformer-based model, EFAS, Entity-driven Fact-aware Abstractive Summarization. We conduct experiments using five state-of-the-art transformer-based models (two of which are specifically designed for long document summarization) and demonstrate that injecting knowledge into the training/inference phase of these models enables the models to achieve significantly better performance than the standard source document-to-summary setting in terms of entity-level factual accuracy, N-gram novelty, and semantic equivalence while performing comparably on ROUGE metrics. The proposed approach is evaluated on ICD-11-Summ-1000, and PubMed-50k., Comment: Accepted to ICPR 2022

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S (1999-2019). However, predicting when someone will attempt suicide has been nearly impossible. In the modern world, many individuals suffering from mental illness seek emotional support and advice on well-known and easily-accessible social media platforms such as Reddit. While prior artificial intelligence research has demonstrated the ability to extract valuable information from social media on suicidal thoughts and behaviors, these efforts have not considered both severity and temporality of risk. The insights made possible by access to such data have enormous clinical potential - most dramatically envisioned as a trigger to employ timely and targeted interventions (i.e., voluntary and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization) to save lives. In this work, we address this knowledge gap by developing deep learning algorithms to assess suicide risk in terms of severity and temporality from Reddit data based on the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS). In particular, we employ two deep learning approaches: time-variant and time-invariant modeling, for user-level suicide risk assessment, and evaluate their performance against a clinician-adjudicated gold standard Reddit corpus annotated based on the C-SSRS. Our results suggest that the time-variant approach outperforms the time-invariant method in the assessment of suicide-related ideations and supportive behaviors (AUC:0.78), while the time-invariant model performed better in predicting suicide-related behaviors and suicide attempt (AUC:0.64). The proposed approach can be integrated with clinical diagnostic interviews for improving suicide risk assessments., Comment: 24 Pages, 8 Tables, 6 Figures; Accepted by PLoS One ; One of the two mentioned Datasets in the manuscript has Closed Access. We will make it public after PLoS One produces the manuscript

We discuss how over the last 30 to 50 years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that focused only on data have been handicapped, and how knowledge has been critical in developing smarter, intelligent, and more effective systems. In fact, the vast progress in AI can be viewed in terms of the three waves of AI as identified by DARPA. During the first wave, handcrafted knowledge has been at the center-piece, while during the second wave, the data-driven approaches supplanted knowledge. Now we see a strong role and resurgence of knowledge fueling major breakthroughs in the third wave of AI underpinning future intelligent systems as they attempt human-like decision making, and seek to become trusted assistants and companions for humans. We find a wider availability of knowledge created from diverse sources, using manual to automated means both by repurposing as well as by extraction. Using knowledge with statistical learning is becoming increasingly indispensable to help make AI systems more transparent and auditable. We will draw a parallel with the role of knowledge and experience in human intelligence based on cognitive science, and discuss emerging neuro-symbolic or hybrid AI systems in which knowledge is the critical enabler for combining capabilities of the data-intensive statistical AI systems with those of symbolic AI systems, resulting in more capable AI systems that support more human-like intelligence., Comment: A version of this will appear as (cite as): IT Professional Magazine (special section to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of IEEE Computer Society), 23 (3) April-May 2021

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the US and the 2nd leading cause of death among teenagers. Clinical and psychosocial factors contribute to suicide risk (SRFs), although documentation and self-expression of such factors in EHRs and social networks vary. This study investigates the degree of variance across EHRs and social networks. We performed subjective analysis of SRFs, such as self-harm, bullying, impulsivity, family violence/discord, using >13.8 Million clinical notes on 123,703 patients with mental health conditions. We clustered clinical notes using semantic embeddings under a set of SRFs. Likewise, we clustered 2180 suicidal users on r/SuicideWatch (~30,000 posts) and performed comparative analysis. Top-3 SRFs documented in EHRs were depressive feelings (24.3%), psychological disorders (21.1%), drug abuse (18.2%). In r/SuicideWatch, gun-ownership (17.3%), self-harm (14.6%), bullying (13.2%) were Top-3 SRFs. Mentions of Family violence, racial discrimination, and other important SRFs contributing to suicide risk were missing from both platforms., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, accepted for Oral Presentation in AMIA Informatics Conference 2021

COVID-19 pandemic has adversely and disproportionately impacted people suffering from mental health issues and substance use problems. This has been exacerbated by social isolation during the pandemic and the social stigma associated with mental health and substance use disorders, making people reluctant to share their struggles and seek help. Due to the anonymity and privacy they provide, social media emerged as a convenient medium for people to share their experiences about their day to day struggles. Reddit is a well-recognized social media platform that provides focused and structured forums called subreddits, that users subscribe to and discuss their experiences with others. Temporal assessment of the topical correlation between social media postings about mental health/substance use and postings about Coronavirus is crucial to better understand public sentiment on the pandemic and its evolving impact, especially related to vulnerable populations. In this study, we conduct a longitudinal topical analysis of postings between subreddits r/depression, r/Anxiety, r/SuicideWatch, and r/Coronavirus, and postings between subreddits r/opiates, r/OpiatesRecovery, r/addiction, and r/Coronavirus from January 2020 - October 2020. Our results show a high topical correlation between postings in r/depression and r/Coronavirus in September 2020. Further, the topical correlation between postings on substance use disorders and Coronavirus fluctuates, showing the highest correlation in August 2020. By monitoring these trends from platforms such as Reddit, epidemiologists, and mental health professionals can gain insights into the challenges faced by communities for targeted interventions., Comment: First workshop on computational & affective intelligence in healthcare applications in conjunction with ICPR 2021

Dementia is a group of irreversible, chronic, and progressive neurodegenerative disorders resulting in impaired memory, communication, and thought processes. In recent years, clinical research advances in brain aging have focused on the earliest clinically detectable stage of incipient dementia, commonly known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Currently, these disorders are diagnosed using a manual analysis of neuropsychological examinations. We measure the feasibility of using the linguistic characteristics of verbal utterances elicited during neuropsychological exams of elderly subjects to distinguish between elderly control groups, people with MCI, people diagnosed with possible Alzheimer's disease (AD), and probable AD. We investigated the performance of both theory-driven psycholinguistic features and data-driven contextual language embeddings in identifying different clinically diagnosed groups. Our experiments show that a combination of contextual and psycholinguistic features extracted by a Support Vector Machine improved distinguishing the verbal utterances of elderly controls, people with MCI, possible AD, and probable AD. This is the first work to identify four clinical diagnosis groups of dementia in a highly imbalanced dataset. Our work shows that machine learning algorithms built on contextual and psycholinguistic features can learn the linguistic biomarkers from verbal utterances and assist clinical diagnosis of different stages and types of dementia, even with limited data., Comment: Camera-ready paper accepted for publication at IEEE BIBM 2020

Existing studies on using social media for deriving mental health status of users focus on the depression detection task. However, for case management and referral to psychiatrists, healthcare workers require practical and scalable depressive disorder screening and triage system. This study aims to design and evaluate a decision support system (DSS) to reliably determine the depressive triage level by capturing fine-grained depressive symptoms expressed in user tweets through the emulation of Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) that is routinely used in clinical practice. The reliable detection of depressive symptoms from tweets is challenging because the 280-character limit on tweets incentivizes the use of creative artifacts in the utterances and figurative usage contributes to effective expression. We propose a novel BERT based robust multi-task learning framework to accurately identify the depressive symptoms using the auxiliary task of figurative usage detection. Specifically, our proposed novel task sharing mechanism, co-task aware attention, enables automatic selection of optimal information across the BERT layers and tasks by soft-sharing of parameters. Our results show that modeling figurative usage can demonstrably improve the model's robustness and reliability for distinguishing the depression symptoms., Comment: Accepted for publication in COLING 2020

Recent advances in natural language processing have enabled automation of a wide range of tasks, including machine translation, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis. Automated summarization of documents, or groups of documents, however, has remained elusive, with many efforts limited to extraction of keywords, key phrases, or key sentences. Accurate abstractive summarization has yet to be achieved due to the inherent difficulty of the problem, and limited availability of training data. In this paper, we propose a topic-centric unsupervised multi-document summarization framework to generate extractive and abstractive summaries for groups of scientific articles across 20 Fields of Study (FoS) in Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and news articles from DUC-2004 Task 2. The proposed algorithm generates an abstractive summary by developing salient language unit selection and text generation techniques. Our approach matches the state-of-the-art when evaluated on automated extractive evaluation metrics and performs better for abstractive summarization on five human evaluation metrics (entailment, coherence, conciseness, readability, and grammar). We achieve a kappa score of 0.68 between two co-author linguists who evaluated our results. We plan to publicly share MAG-20, a human-validated gold standard dataset of topic-clustered research articles and their summaries to promote research in abstractive summarization., Comment: 6 pages, 6 Figures, 8 Tables. Accepted at IEEE Big Data 2020 (https://bigdataieee.org/BigData2020/AcceptedPapers.html)

With the increasing legalization of medical and recreational use of cannabis, more research is needed to understand the association between depression and consumer behavior related to cannabis consumption. Big social media data has potential to provide deeper insights about these associations to public health analysts. In this interdisciplinary study, we demonstrate the value of incorporating domain-specific knowledge in the learning process to identify the relationships between cannabis use and depression. We develop an end-to-end knowledge infused deep learning framework (Gated-K-BERT) that leverages the pre-trained BERT language representation model and domain-specific declarative knowledge source (Drug Abuse Ontology (DAO)) to jointly extract entities and their relationship using gated fusion sharing mechanism. Our model is further tailored to provide more focus to the entities mention in the sentence through entity-position aware attention layer, where ontology is used to locate the target entities position. Experimental results show that inclusion of the knowledge-aware attentive representation in association with BERT can extract the cannabis-depression relationship with better coverage in comparison to the state-of-the-art relation extractor.

The convenience of social media has also enabled its misuse, potentially resulting in toxic behavior. Nearly 66% of internet users have observed online harassment, and 41% claim personal experience, with 18% facing severe forms of online harassment. This toxic communication has a significant impact on the well-being of young individuals, affecting mental health and, in some cases, resulting in suicide. These communications exhibit complex linguistic and contextual characteristics, making recognition of such narratives challenging. In this paper, we provide a multimodal dataset of toxic social media interactions between confirmed high school students, called ALONE (AdoLescents ON twittEr), along with descriptive explanation. Each instance of interaction includes tweets, images, emoji and related metadata. Our observations show that individual tweets do not provide sufficient evidence for toxic behavior, and meaningful use of context in interactions can enable highlighting or exonerating tweets with purported toxicity., Comment: Accepted: Social Informatics 2020

Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is a hereditary disorder of red blood cells in humans. Complications such as pain, stroke, and organ failure occur in SCD as malformed, sickled red blood cells passing through small blood vessels get trapped. Particularly, acute pain is known to be the primary symptom of SCD. The insidious and subjective nature of SCD pain leads to challenges in pain assessment among Medical Practitioners (MPs). Thus, accurate identification of markers of pain in patients with SCD is crucial for pain management. Classifying clinical notes of patients with SCD based on their pain level enables MPs to give appropriate treatment. We propose a binary classification model to predict pain relevance of clinical notes and a multiclass classification model to predict pain level. While our four binary machine learning (ML) classifiers are comparable in their performance, Decision Trees had the best performance for the multiclass classification task achieving 0.70 in F-measure. Our results show the potential clinical text analysis and machine learning offer to pain management in sickle cell patients., Comment: The 42nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a serious adverse impact on the lives of people across the world. COVID-19 has exacerbated community-wide depression, and has led to increased drug abuse brought about by isolation of individuals as a result of lockdown. Further, apart from providing informative content to the public, the incessant media coverage of COVID-19 crisis in terms of news broadcasts, published articles and sharing of information on social media have had the undesired snowballing effect on stress levels (further elevating depression and drug use) due to uncertain future. In this position paper, we propose a novel framework for assessing the spatio-temporal-thematic progression of depression, drug abuse, and informativeness of the underlying news content across the different states in the United States. Our framework employs an attention-based transfer learning technique to apply knowledge learned on a social media domain to a target domain of media exposure. To extract news articles that are related to COVID-19 communications from the streaming news content on the web, we use neural semantic parsing, and background knowledge bases in a sequence of steps called semantic filtering. We achieve promising preliminary results on three variations of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model. We compare our findings against a report from Mental Health America and the results show that our fine-tuned BERT models perform better than vanilla BERT. Our study can benefit epidemiologists by offering actionable insights on COVID-19 and its regional impact. Further, our solution can be integrated into end-user applications to tailor news for users based on their emotional tone measured on the scale of depressiveness, drug abusiveness, and informativeness., Comment: 2020 ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Knowledge-infused Mining and Learning (KiML'20)

Imprecise composite location references formed using ad hoc spatial expressions in English text makes the geocoding task challenging for both inference and evaluation. Typically such spatial expressions fill in unestablished areas with new toponyms for finer spatial referents. For example, the spatial extent of the ad hoc spatial expression "north of" or "50 minutes away from" in relation to the toponym "Dayton, OH" refers to an ambiguous, imprecise area, requiring translation from this qualitative representation to a quantitative one with precise semantics using systems such as WGS84. Here we highlight the challenges of geocoding such referents and propose a formal representation that employs background knowledge, semantic approximations and rules, and fuzzy linguistic variables. We also discuss an appropriate evaluation technique for the task that is based on human contextualized and subjective judgment., Comment: In Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL '19)

With ubiquity of social media platforms, millions of people are sharing their online persona by expressing their thoughts, moods, emotions, feelings, and even their daily struggles with mental health issues voluntarily and publicly on social media. Unlike the most existing efforts which study depression by analyzing textual content, we examine and exploit multimodal big data to discern depressive behavior using a wide variety of features including individual-level demographics. By developing a multimodal framework and employing statistical techniques for fusing heterogeneous sets of features obtained by processing visual, textual and user interaction data, we significantly enhance the current state-of-the-art approaches for identifying depressed individuals on Twitter (improving the average F1-Score by 5 percent) as well as facilitate demographic inference from social media for broader applications. Besides providing insights into the relationship between demographics and mental health, our research assists in the design of a new breed of demographic-aware health interventions.

Objective: Asthma is a chronic pulmonary disease with multiple triggers manifesting as symptoms with various intensities. This paper evaluates the suitability of long-term monitoring of pediatric asthma using diverse data to qualify and quantify triggers that contribute to the asthma symptoms and control to enable a personalized management plan. Materials and Methods: Asthma condition, environment, and adherence to the prescribed care plan were continuously tracked for 97 pediatric patients using kHealth-Asthma technology for one or three months. Result: At the cohort level, among 21% of the patients deployed in spring, 63% and 19% indicated pollen and Particulate Matter (PM2.5), respectively, as the major asthma contributors. Of the 18% of the patients deployed in fall, 29% and 21% found pollen and PM2.5 respectively, to be the contributors. For the 28% of the patients deployed in winter, PM2.5 was identified as the major contributor for 80% of them. One patient across each season has been chosen to explain the determination of personalized triggers by observing correlations between triggers and asthma symptoms gathered from anecdotal evidence. Discussion and Conclusion: Both public and personal health signals including compliance to prescribed care plan have been captured through continuous monitoring using the kHealth-Asthma technology which generated insights on causes of asthma symptoms across different seasons. Collectively, they can form the underlying basis for personalized management plan and intervention. KEYWORDS: Personalized Digital Health, Medical Internet of Things, Pediatric Asthma Management, Patient Generated Health Data, Personalized Triggers, Telehealth, Comment: contact author: Amit Sheth amit@knoesius.org

Disclaimer: This paper is concerned with violent online harassment. To describe the subject at an adequate level of realism, examples of our collected tweets involve violent, threatening, vulgar and hateful speech language in the context of racial, sexual, political, appearance and intellectual harassment. The presence of a significant amount of harassment in user-generated content and its negative impact calls for robust automatic detection approaches. This requires that we can identify different forms or types of harassment. Earlier work has classified harassing language in terms of hurtfulness, abusiveness, sentiment, and profanity. However, to identify and understand harassment more accurately, it is essential to determine the context that represents the interrelated conditions in which they occur. In this paper, we introduce the notion of contextual type to harassment involving five categories: (i) sexual, (ii) racial, (iii) appearance-related, (iv) intellectual and (v) political. We utilize an annotated corpus from Twitter distinguishing these types of harassment. To study the context for each type that sheds light on the linguistic meaning, interpretation, and distribution, we conduct two lines of investigation: an extensive linguistic analysis, and a statistical distribution of unigrams. We then build type-ware classifiers to automate the identification of type-specific harassment. Our experiments demonstrate that these classifiers provide competitive accuracy for identifying and analyzing harassment on social media. We present extensive discussion and major observations about the effectiveness of type-aware classifiers using a detailed comparison setup providing insight into the role of type-dependent features., Comment: Submitted for PLOS ONE Journal 17 pages

The ever-growing datasets published on Linked Open Data mainly contain encyclopedic information. However, there is a lack of quality structured and semantically annotated datasets extracted from unstructured real-time sources. In this paper, we present principles for developing a knowledge graph of interlinked events using the case study of news headlines published on Twitter which is a real-time and eventful source of fresh information. We represent the essential pipeline containing the required tasks ranging from choosing background data model, event annotation (i.e., event recognition and classification), entity annotation and eventually interlinking events. The state-of-the-art is limited to domain-specific scenarios for recognizing and classifying events, whereas this paper plays the role of a domain-agnostic road-map for developing a knowledge graph of interlinked events.

This work addresses challenges arising from extracting entities from textual data, including the high cost of data annotation, model accuracy, selecting appropriate evaluation criteria, and the overall quality of annotation. We present a framework that integrates Entity Set Expansion (ESE) and Active Learning (AL) to reduce the annotation cost of sparse data and provide an online evaluation method as feedback. This incremental and interactive learning framework allows for rapid annotation and subsequent extraction of sparse data while maintaining high accuracy. We evaluate our framework on three publicly available datasets and show that it drastically reduces the cost of sparse entity annotation by an average of 85% and 45% to reach 0.9 and 1.0 F-Scores respectively. Moreover, the method exhibited robust performance across all datasets., Comment: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C18-1059/

With 93% of pro-marijuana population in US favoring legalization of medical marijuana, high expectations of a greater return for Marijuana stocks, and public actively sharing information about medical, recreational and business aspects related to marijuana, it is no surprise that marijuana culture is thriving on Twitter. After the legalization of marijuana for recreational and medical purposes in 29 states, there has been a dramatic increase in the volume of drug-related communication on Twitter. Specifically, Twitter accounts have been established for promotional and informational purposes, some prominent among them being American Ganja, Medical Marijuana Exchange, and Cannabis Now. Identification and characterization of different user types can allow us to conduct more fine-grained spatiotemporal analysis to identify dominant or emerging topics in the echo chambers of marijuana-related communities on Twitter. In this research, we mainly focus on classifying Twitter accounts created and run by ordinary users, retailers, and informed agencies. Classifying user accounts by type can enable better capturing and highlighting of aspects such as trending topics, business profiling of marijuana companies, and state-specific marijuana policymaking. Furthermore, type-based analysis can provide more profound understanding and reliable assessment of the implications of marijuana-related communications. We developed a comprehensive approach to classifying users by their types on Twitter through contextualization of their marijuana-related conversations. We accomplished this using compositional multiview embedding synthesized from People, Content, and Network views achieving 8% improvement over the empirical baseline.

Predictive analysis of social media data has attracted considerable attention from the research community as well as the business world because of the essential and actionable information it can provide. Over the years, extensive experimentation and analysis for insights have been carried out using Twitter data in various domains such as healthcare, public health, politics, social sciences, and demographics. In this chapter, we discuss techniques, approaches and state-of-the-art applications of predictive analysis of Twitter data. Specifically, we present fine-grained analysis involving aspects such as sentiment, emotion, and the use of domain knowledge in the coarse-grained analysis of Twitter data for making decisions and taking actions, and relate a few success stories.

Having a quality annotated corpus is essential especially for applied research. Despite the recent focus of Web science community on researching about cyberbullying, the community dose not still have standard benchmarks. In this paper, we publish first, a quality annotated corpus and second, an offensive words lexicon capturing different types type of harassment as (i) sexual harassment, (ii) racial harassment, (iii) appearance-related harassment, (iv) intellectual harassment, and (v) political harassment.We crawled data from Twitter using our offensive lexicon. Then relied on the human judge to annotate the collected tweets w.r.t. the contextual types because using offensive words is not sufficient to reliably detect harassment. Our corpus consists of 25,000 annotated tweets in five contextual types. We are pleased to share this novel annotated corpus and the lexicon with the research community. The instruction to acquire the corpus has been published on the Git repository.

With the rise of social media, millions of people are routinely expressing their moods, feelings, and daily struggles with mental health issues on social media platforms like Twitter. Unlike traditional observational cohort studies conducted through questionnaires and self-reported surveys, we explore the reliable detection of clinical depression from tweets obtained unobtrusively. Based on the analysis of tweets crawled from users with self-reported depressive symptoms in their Twitter profiles, we demonstrate the potential for detecting clinical depression symptoms which emulate the PHQ-9 questionnaire clinicians use today. Our study uses a semi-supervised statistical model to evaluate how the duration of these symptoms and their expression on Twitter (in terms of word usage patterns and topical preferences) align with the medical findings reported via the PHQ-9. Our proactive and automatic screening tool is able to identify clinical depressive symptoms with an accuracy of 68% and precision of 72%., Comment: 8 pages, Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference

Extracting location names from informal and unstructured social media data requires the identification of referent boundaries and partitioning compound names. Variability, particularly systematic variability in location names (Carroll, 1983), challenges the identification task. Some of this variability can be anticipated as operations within a statistical language model, in this case drawn from gazetteers such as OpenStreetMap (OSM), Geonames, and DBpedia. This permits evaluation of an observed n-gram in Twitter targeted text as a legitimate location name variant from the same location-context. Using n-gram statistics and location-related dictionaries, our Location Name Extraction tool (LNEx) handles abbreviations and automatically filters and augments the location names in gazetteers (handling name contractions and auxiliary contents) to help detect the boundaries of multi-word location names and thereby delimit them in texts. We evaluated our approach on 4,500 event-specific tweets from three targeted streams to compare the performance of LNEx against that of ten state-of-the-art taggers that rely on standard semantic, syntactic and/or orthographic features. LNEx improved the average F-Score by 33-179%, outperforming all taggers. Further, LNEx is capable of stream processing., Comment: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C18-1169.pdf

Over the years, Twitter has become one of the largest communication platforms providing key data to various applications such as brand monitoring, trend detection, among others. Entity linking is one of the major tasks in natural language understanding from tweets and it associates entity mentions in text to corresponding entries in knowledge bases in order to provide unambiguous interpretation and additional con- text. State-of-the-art techniques have focused on linking explicitly mentioned entities in tweets with reasonable success. However, we argue that in addition to explicit mentions i.e. The movie Gravity was more ex- pensive than the mars orbiter mission entities (movie Gravity) can also be mentioned implicitly i.e. This new space movie is crazy. you must watch it!. This paper introduces the problem of implicit entity linking in tweets. We propose an approach that models the entities by exploiting their factual and contextual knowledge. We demonstrate how to use these models to perform implicit entity linking on a ground truth dataset with 397 tweets from two domains, namely, Movie and Book. Specifically, we show: 1) the importance of linking implicit entities and its value addition to the standard entity linking task, and 2) the importance of exploiting contextual knowledge associated with an entity for linking their implicit mentions. We also make the ground truth dataset publicly available to foster the research in this new research area., Comment: This paper was accepted at the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2016 as a full research track paper

Machine Learning has been a big success story during the AI resurgence. One particular stand out success relates to learning from a massive amount of data. In spite of early assertions of the unreasonable effectiveness of data, there is increasing recognition for utilizing knowledge whenever it is available or can be created purposefully. In this paper, we discuss the indispensable role of knowledge for deeper understanding of content where (i) large amounts of training data are unavailable, (ii) the objects to be recognized are complex, (e.g., implicit entities and highly subjective content), and (iii) applications need to use complementary or related data in multiple modalities/media. What brings us to the cusp of rapid progress is our ability to (a) create relevant and reliable knowledge and (b) carefully exploit knowledge to enhance ML/NLP techniques. Using diverse examples, we seek to foretell unprecedented progress in our ability for deeper understanding and exploitation of multimodal data and continued incorporation of knowledge in learning techniques., Comment: Pre-print of the paper accepted at 2017 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1610.07708

While the general analysis of named entities has received substantial research attention on unstructured as well as structured data, the analysis of relations among named entities has received limited focus. In fact, a review of the literature revealed a deficiency in research on the abstract conceptualization required to organize relations. We believe that such an abstract conceptualization can benefit various communities and applications such as natural language processing, information extraction, machine learning, and ontology engineering. In this paper, we present Comprehensive EVent Ontology (CEVO), built on Levin's conceptual hierarchy of English verbs that categorizes verbs with shared meaning, and syntactic behavior. We present the fundamental concepts and requirements for this ontology. Furthermore, we present three use cases employing the CEVO ontology on annotation tasks: (i) annotating relations in plain text, (ii) annotating ontological properties, and (iii) linking textual relations to ontological properties. These use-cases demonstrate the benefits of using CEVO for annotation: (i) annotating English verbs from an abstract conceptualization, (ii) playing the role of an upper ontology for organizing ontological properties, and (iii) facilitating the annotation of text relations using any underlying vocabulary. This resource is available at https://shekarpour.github.io/cevo.io/ using https://w3id.org/cevo namespace.

The Singleton Property (SP) approach has been proposed for representing and querying metadata about RDF triples such as provenance, time, location, and evidence. In this approach, one singleton property is created to uniquely represent a relationship in a particular context, and in general, generates a large property hierarchy in the schema. It has become the subject of important questions from Semantic Web practitioners. Can an existing reasoner recognize the singleton property triples? And how? If the singleton property triples describe a data triple, then how can a reasoner infer this data triple from the singleton property triples? Or would the large property hierarchy affect the reasoners in some way? We address these questions in this paper and present our study about the reasoning aspects of the singleton properties. We propose a simple mechanism to enable existing reasoners to recognize the singleton property triples, as well as to infer the data triples described by the singleton property triples. We evaluate the effect of the singleton property triples in the reasoning processes by comparing the performance on RDF datasets with and without singleton properties. Our evaluation uses as benchmark the LUBM datasets and the LUBM-SP datasets derived from LUBM with temporal information added through singleton properties.

While contemporary semantic search systems offer to improve classical keyword-based search, they are not always adequate for complex domain specific information needs. The domain of prescription drug abuse, for example, requires knowledge of both ontological concepts and 'intelligible constructs' not typically modeled in ontologies. These intelligible constructs convey essential information that include notions of intensity, frequency, interval, dosage and sentiments, which could be important to the holistic needs of the information seeker. We present a hybrid approach to domain specific information retrieval (or knowledge-aware search) that integrates ontology-driven query interpretation with synonym-based query expansion and domain specific rules, to facilitate search in social media. Our framework is based on a context-free grammar (CFG) that defines the query language of constructs interpretable by the search system. The grammar provides two levels of semantic interpretation: 1) a top-level CFG that facilitates retrieval of diverse textual patterns, which belong to broad templates and 2) a low-level CFG that enables interpretation of certain specific expressions that belong to such patterns. These low-level expressions occur as concepts from four different categories of data: 1) ontological concepts, 2) concepts in lexicons (such as emotions and sentiments), 3) concepts in lexicons with only partial ontology representation, called lexico-ontology concepts (such as side effects and routes of administration (ROA)), and 4) domain specific expressions (such as date, time, interval, frequency and dosage) derived solely through rules. Our approach is embodied in a novel Semantic Web platform called PREDOSE developed for prescription drug abuse epidemiology. Keywords: Knowledge-Aware Search, Ontology, Semantic Search, Background Knowledge, Context-Free Grammar, Comment: Accepted for publication: Journal of Web Semantics, Elsevier