No Arabic abstract
While ancient scientists often had patrons to fund their work, peer review of proposals for the allocation of resources is a foundation of modern science. A very common method is that proposals are evaluated by a small panel of experts (due to logistics and funding limitations) nominated by the grant-giving institutions. The expert panel process introduces several issues - most notably: 1) biases introduced in the selection of the panel. 2) experts have to read a very large number of proposals. Distributed Peer Review promises to alleviate several of the described problems by distributing the task of reviewing among the proposers. Each proposer is given a limited number of proposals to review and rank. We present the result of an experiment running a machine-learning enhanced distributed peer review process for allocation of telescope time at the European Southern Observatory. In this work, we show that the distributed peer review is statistically the same as a `traditional panel, that our machine learning algorithm can predict expertise of reviewers with a high success rate, and we find that seniority and reviewer expertise have an influence on review quality. The general experience has been overwhelmingly praised from the participating community (using an anonymous feedback mechanism).
The Bangla language is the seventh most spoken language, with 265 million native and non-native speakers worldwide. However, English is the predominant language for online resources and technical knowledge, journals, and documentation. Consequently, many Bangla-speaking people, who have limited command of English, face hurdles to utilize English resources. To bridge the gap between limited support and increasing demand, researchers conducted many experiments and developed valuable tools and techniques to create and process Bangla language materials. Many efforts are also ongoing to make it easy to use the Bangla language in the online and technical domains. There are some review papers to understand the past, previous, and future Bangla Natural Language Processing (BNLP) trends. The studies are mainly concentrated on the specific domains of BNLP, such as sentiment analysis, speech recognition, optical character recognition, and text summarization. There is an apparent scarcity of resources that contain a comprehensive study of the recent BNLP tools and methods. Therefore, in this paper, we present a thorough review of 71 BNLP research papers and categorize them into 11 categories, namely Information Extraction, Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition, Parsing, Parts of Speech Tagging, Question Answering System, Sentiment Analysis, Spam and Fake Detection, Text Summarization, Word Sense Disambiguation, and Speech Processing and Recognition. We study articles published between 1999 to 2021, and 50% of the papers were published after 2015. We discuss Classical, Machine Learning and Deep Learning approaches with different datasets while addressing the limitations and current and future trends of the BNLP.
PURPOSE: The medical literature relevant to germline genetics is growing exponentially. Clinicians need tools monitoring and prioritizing the literature to understand the clinical implications of the pathogenic genetic variants. We developed and evaluated two machine learning models to classify abstracts as relevant to the penetrance (risk of cancer for germline mutation carriers) or prevalence of germline genetic mutations. METHODS: We conducted literature searches in PubMed and retrieved paper titles and abstracts to create an annotated dataset for training and evaluating the two machine learning classification models. Our first model is a support vector machine (SVM) which learns a linear decision rule based on the bag-of-ngrams representation of each title and abstract. Our second model is a convolutional neural network (CNN) which learns a complex nonlinear decision rule based on the raw title and abstract. We evaluated the performance of the two models on the classification of papers as relevant to penetrance or prevalence. RESULTS: For penetrance classification, we annotated 3740 paper titles and abstracts and used 60% for training the model, 20% for tuning the model, and 20% for evaluating the model. The SVM model achieves 89.53% accuracy (percentage of papers that were correctly classified) while the CNN model achieves 88.95 % accuracy. For prevalence classification, we annotated 3753 paper titles and abstracts. The SVM model achieves 89.14% accuracy while the CNN model achieves 89.13 % accuracy. CONCLUSION: Our models achieve high accuracy in classifying abstracts as relevant to penetrance or prevalence. By facilitating literature review, this tool could help clinicians and researchers keep abreast of the burgeoning knowledge of gene-cancer associations and keep the knowledge bases for clinical decision support tools up to date.
Neural networks models for NLP are typically implemented without the explicit encoding of language rules and yet they are able to break one performance record after another. This has generated a lot of research interest in interpreting the representations learned by these networks. We propose here a novel interpretation approach that relies on the only processing system we have that does understand language: the human brain. We use brain imaging recordings of subjects reading complex natural text to interpret word and sequence embeddings from 4 recent NLP models - ELMo, USE, BERT and Transformer-XL. We study how their representations differ across layer depth, context length, and attention type. Our results reveal differences in the context-related representations across these models. Further, in the transformer models, we find an interaction between layer depth and context length, and between layer depth and attention type. We finally hypothesize that altering BERT to better align with brain recordings would enable it to also better understand language. Probing the altered BERT using syntactic NLP tasks reveals that the model with increased brain-alignment outperforms the original model. Cognitive neuroscientists have already begun using NLP networks to study the brain, and this work closes the loop to allow the interaction between NLP and cognitive neuroscience to be a true cross-pollination.
Hundreds of thousands of astronomy education activities exist, but their discoverability and quality is highly variable. The web platform for astronomy education activities, astroEDU, presented in this paper tries to solve these issues. Using the familiar peer-review workflow of scientific publications, astroEDU is improving standards of quality, visibility and accessibility, while providing credibility to these astronomy education activities. astroEDU targets activity guides, tutorials and other educational activities in the area of astronomy education, prepared by teachers, educators and other education specialists. Each of the astroEDU activities is peer-reviewed by an educator as well as an astronomer to ensure a high standard in terms of scientific content and educational value. All reviewed materials are then stored in a free open online database, enabling broad distribution in a range of different formats. In this way astroEDU is not another web repository for educational resources but a mechanism for peer-reviewing and publishing high-quality astronomy education activities in an open access way. This paper will provide an account on the implementation and first findings of the use of astroEDU.
Federated Learning aims to learn machine learning models from multiple decentralized edge devices (e.g. mobiles) or servers without sacrificing local data privacy. Recent Natural Language Processing techniques rely on deep learning and large pre-trained language models. However, both big deep neural and language models are trained with huge amounts of data which often lies on the server side. Since text data is widely originated from end users, in this work, we look into recent NLP models and techniques which use federated learning as the learning framework. Our survey discusses major challenges in federated natural language processing, including the algorithm challenges, system challenges as well as the privacy issues. We also provide a critical review of the existing Federated NLP evaluation methods and tools. Finally, we highlight the current research gaps and future directions.