Novel Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Methods to Characterize Unstructured Patient-Reported Outcomes

Fenomena bullying di media sosial, khususnya di Twitter, telah menjadi isu yang semakin memprihatinkan dengan dampak signifikan terhadap kesehatan mental pengguna. Dalam rangka mengatasi masalah ini, deteksi otomatis tweet yang mengandung konten bullying menjadi sangat penting. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk membandingkan performa dua model pemrosesan bahasa alami terbaru, yaitu BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) dan XLNet, dalam klasifikasi tweet yang mengandung bullying. Metodologi penelitian ini melibatkan pengumpulan dataset tweet yang telah dilabeli sebagai bullying atau non-bullying. Proses preprocessing teks dilakukan untuk membersihkan dan menyiapkan data sebelum digunakan dalam pelatihan model. Kedua model, BERT dan XLNet, dilatih dan diuji menggunakan dataset yang sama. Evaluasi performa dilakukan dengan menggunakan metrik akurasi, presisi, recall, dan F1-score. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kedua model memiliki kemampuan yang baik dalam mengidentifikasi tweet bullying, akan tetapi XLNet menunjukkan performa yang lebih unggul dibandingkan BERT dengan tingkat akurasi sebesar 95%. Dengan nilai presisi = 100%, recall = 0,87%, dan F1-score = 0,88%. XLNet mampu menangkap konteks dan nuansa bahasa yang lebih kompleks dalam tweet, yang berkontribusi pada akurasi klasifikasi yang lebih tinggi. Penelitian ini memberikan kontribusi penting dalam bidang deteksi bullying di media sosial dengan menunjukkan bahwa penggunaan model XLNet lebih efektif dibandingkan BERT. Temuan ini dapat membantu platform seperti Twitter dalam mengidentifikasi dan mencegah konten bullying, sehingga menciptakan lingkungan online yang lebih aman bagi pengguna, serta dapat digunakan sebagai dasar untuk pengembangan sistem deteksi bullying yang lebih canggih dan efisien di masa depan. Abstract The phenomenon of bullying on social media, particularly on Twitter, has become an increasingly concerning issue with significant impacts on users' mental health. In order to address this issue, automatic detection of tweets containing bullying content is crucial. This study aims to compare the performance of two recent natural language processing models, namely BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and XLNet, in the classification of tweets containing bullying. The research methodology involves collecting a dataset of tweets that have been labelled as bullying or non-bullying. Text preprocessing is done to clean and prepare the data before it is used in model training. Both models, BERT and XLNet, were trained and tested using the same dataset. Performance evaluation was conducted using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. The results show that both models have a good ability to identify bullying tweets, but XLNet shows superior performance compared to BERT with an accuracy rate of 95%. With precision = 100%, recall = 0.87%, and F1-score = 0.88%. XLNet is able to capture more complex context and language nuances in tweets, which contributes to higher classification accuracy. This research makes an important contribution to the field of bullying detection on social media by showing that the use of the XLNet model is more effective than BERT. These findings can help platforms like Twitter identify and prevent bullying content, thereby creating a safer online environment for users, and can be used as a basis for the development of more sophisticated and efficient bullying detection systems in the future.

BackgroundIt is essential for radiologists to communicate actionable findings to the referring clinicians reliably. Natural language processing (NLP) has been shown to help identify free-text radiology reports including actionable findings. However, the application of recent deep learning techniques to radiology reports, which can improve the detection performance, has not been thoroughly examined. Moreover, free-text that clinicians input in the ordering form (order information) has seldom been used to identify actionable reports. This study aims to evaluate the benefits of two new approaches: (1) bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), a recent deep learning architecture in NLP, and (2) using order information in addition to radiology reports.MethodsWe performed a binary classification to distinguish actionable reports (i.e., radiology reports tagged as actionable in actual radiological practice) from non-actionable ones (those without an actionable tag). 90,923 Japanese radiology reports in our hospital were used, of which 788 (0.87%) were actionable. We evaluated four methods, statistical machine learning with logistic regression (LR) and with gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT), and deep learning with a bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) model and a publicly available Japanese BERT model. Each method was used with two different inputs, radiology reports alone and pairs of order information and radiology reports. Thus, eight experiments were conducted to examine the performance.ResultsWithout order information, BERT achieved the highest area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.5138, which showed a statistically significant improvement over LR, GBDT, and LSTM, and the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.9516. Simply coupling the order information with the radiology reports slightly increased the AUPRC of BERT but did not lead to a statistically significant improvement. This may be due to the complexity of clinical decisions made by radiologists.ConclusionsBERT was assumed to be useful to detect actionable reports. More sophisticated methods are required to use order information effectively.

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and BERT-based approaches are the current state-of-the-art in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks; however, their application to document classification on long clinical texts is limited. In this work, we introduce four methods to scale BERT, which by default can only handle input sequences up to approximately 400 words long, to perform document classification on clinical texts several thousand words long. We compare these methods against two much simpler architectures - a word-level convolutional neural network and a hierarchical self-attention network - and show that BERT often cannot beat these simpler baselines when classifying MIMIC-III discharge summaries and SEER cancer pathology reports. In our analysis, we show that two key components of BERT - pretraining and WordPiece tokenization - may actually be inhibiting BERT's performance on clinical text classification tasks where the input document is several thousand words long and where correctly identifying labels may depend more on identifying a few key words or phrases rather than understanding the contextual meaning of sequences of text.

In this paper we focus on an Natural Language Inference task. Being given two sentences, we classify their relation as NEUTRAL, ENTAILMENT or CONTRADICTION. Considering the achievements of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) in many Natural Language Processing tasks, we use BERT features to create our base model for this task. However, several questions arise: can other features improve the performance obtained with BERT? If we are able to predict the situations in which BERT will fail, can we improve the performance by providing alternative models for these situations? We test several strategies and models, as alternatives to the standalone BERT model in the possible failure situations, and we take advantage of semantic features extracted from Discourse Representation Structures.

We study the problem of incorporating prior knowledge into a deep Transformer-based model,i.e.,Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to enhance its performance on semantic textual matching tasks. By probing and analyzing what BERT has already known when solving this task, we obtain better understanding of what task-specific knowledge BERT needs the most and where it is most needed. The analysis further motivates us to take a different approach than most existing works. Instead of using prior knowledge to create a new training task for fine-tuning BERT, we directly inject knowledge into BERT's multi-head attention mechanism. This leads us to a simple yet effective approach that enjoys fast training stage as it saves the model from training on additional data or tasks other than the main task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed knowledge-enhanced BERT is able to consistently improve semantic textual matching performance over the original BERT model, and the performance benefit is most salient when training data is scarce.

Sentiment analysis of news media articles is essential for understanding the dynamics of conflict and cooperation in transboundary rivers. However, it is not known which machine learning model(s) can best meet the requirement of sentiment analysis for transboundary rivers. This study presents a comparative examination of ten machine learning models commonly used in the field of text sentiment analysis, including K-Nearest Neighbors, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Decision Tree, Extreme Gradient Boosting, Multilayer Perceptron, Long Short-Term Memory and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, for five-class sentiment classification of 9382 news articles (1977–2022) attending to transboundary water conflict and cooperation. By evaluating their performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model demonstrated good overall performance and prediction capabilities for news articles with conflictive sentiments. By comparing with the AFINN sentiment dictionary, BERT showed superior performance in the prediction and identification of conflictive sentiment labels. And by validating against historical water events in the three river basins, BERT performed best in the Indus River basin. The findings of this study hold significant implications for government agencies in transboundary rivers, allowing them to promptly assess and respond to public sentiment, thereby preventing water conflict and promoting water cooperation.

Recently, people used social media to convey their emotions in the text. Text classification is required for group a text containing emotion or not and identify the type of emotion. Most of the research in emotion classification use machine learning methods. So this research offers the use of deep learning for the classification of emotions in text. One of the algorithms that is widely used for deep learning is BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). For the experiment, classification is divided into two phases, namely the first phase groups emotion or not emotion tweets, and the second phase groups emotion tweets into five types of emotions, namely happy, angry, sad, scared and surprised. The experiment uses three data scenarios, namely the commuter line, transjakarta and combination data. The BERT method was compared with the BiLSTM and LSTM methods for emotion classification. The result of this study is BERT generates the highest accuracy compared to other methods for the three data scenarios with values of 87.24%, 86.27%, and 86.99% in the first phase. Then, the next accuracy value followed by obtained BiLSTM, and the last is LSTM. In the second phase, BERT also obtained the highest accuracy values for the three data scenarios with values of 94.26%, 93.71 %, and 93.98%. Then, the evaluation using Precision, Recall and F1-Measure results that BERT provides the best overall method. In this study, BERT has good performance for emotion classification.

Multitask learning (MTL) and data augmentation are becoming increasingly popular in natural language processing (NLP). These techniques are particularly useful when data are scarce. In MTL, knowledge learned from one task is applied to another. To address data scarcity, data augmentation facilitates by providing additional synthetic data during model training. In NLP, the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model is the default candidate for various tasks. MTL and data augmentation using BERT have yielded promising results. However, a detailed study regarding the effect of using MTL in different layers of BERT and the benefit of data augmentation in these configurations has not been conducted. In this study, we investigate the use of MTL and data augmentation from generative models, specifically for category classification, sentiment classification, and aspect-opinion sequence-labeling using BERT. The layers of BERT are categorized into top, middle, and bottom layers, which are frozen, shared, or unshared. Experiments are conducted to identify the optimal layer configuration for improved performance compared with that of single-task learning. Generative models are used to generate augmented data, and experiments are performed to reveal their effectiveness. The results indicate the effectiveness of the MTL configuration compared with single-task learning as well as the effectiveness of data augmentation using generative models for classification tasks.

Text classification algorithms investigate the intricate relationships between words or phrases and attempt to deduce the document's interpretation. In the last few years, these algorithms have progressed tremendously. Transformer architecture and sentence encoders have proven to give superior results on natural language processing tasks. But a major limitation of these architectures is their applicability for text no longer than a few hundred words. In this paper, we explore hierarchical transfer learning approaches for long document classification. We employ pre-trained Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) in a hierarchical setup to capture better representations efficiently. Our proposed models are conceptually simple where we divide the input data into chunks and then pass this through base models of BERT and USE. Then output representation for each chunk is then propagated through a shallow neural network comprising of LSTMs or CNNs for classifying the text data. These extensions are evaluated on 6 benchmark datasets. We show that USE + CNN/LSTM performs better than its stand-alone baseline. Whereas the BERT + CNN/LSTM performs on par with its stand-alone counterpart. However, the hierarchical BERT models are still desirable as it avoids the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism in BERT. Along with the hierarchical approaches, this work also provides a comparison of different deep learning algorithms like USE, BERT, HAN, Longformer, and BigBird for long document classification. The Longformer approach consistently performs well on most of the datasets.

Conversational search is the dominant intent of Question Answering, which is achieved through different NLP techniques, Deep Learning models. The advent of Transformer models has been a breakthrough in Natural Language Processing applications, which has attained a benchmark on state of NLP tasks such as question answering. Here we propose a semantic Malayalam Question Answering system that automatically answers the queries related to health issues. The Biomedical Question-Answering, especially in the Malayalam language, is a tedious and challenging task. The proposed model uses a neural network-based Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT), to implement the question answering system. In this study, we investigate how to train and fine-tune a BERT model for Question-Answering. The system has been tested with our own annotated Malayalam SQUAD form health dataset. In comparing the result with our previous works - Word embedding and RNN based model, identified we find that our BERT model is more accurate than the previous models and achieves an F1 score of 86%.

Given the foundational role of system requirements in design projects, designers can benefit from classifying, comparing, and observing connections between requirements. Manually undertaking these processes, however, can be laborious and time-consuming. Previous studies have employed Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) deep neural network model, to automatically analyze written requirements. Yet, it remains unclear whether BERT can sufficiently capture the nuances that differentiate requirements between and within design documents. This work evaluates BERT’s performance on two requirement classification tasks (one inter- document and one intra-document) executed on a corpus of 1,303 requirements sourced from five system design projects. First, in the “parent document classification” task, a BERT model is fine-tuned to classify requirements according to their originating project. A separate BERT model is then fine-tuned on a “functional classification” task where each requirement is classified as either functional or nonfunctional. Our results also include a comparison with a baseline model, Word2Vec, and demonstrate that our model achieves higher classification accuracy. When evaluated on test sets, the former model receives a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.95, while the latter receives an MCC of 0.82, indicating BERT’s ability to reliably distinguish requirements. This work then explores the application of BERT’s representations, known as embeddings, to identify similar requirements and predict requirement change.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a pivotal area in artificial intelligence, aiming to make computers capable of understanding and generating human language. This study evaluates and compares three prominent NLP models—the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, and Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding (XLNet)—to determine their strengths, limitations, and suitability for various tasks. The research involves a comprehensive analysis of these models, utilizing well-established datasets such as the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE), Reading Comprehension from Examinations (RACE), and the Situations with Adversarial Generations (SWAG). The study explores each model's architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning processes: GPT’s unidirectional approach is assessed for its language generation and handling of long-range dependencies; Bidirectional encoding is examined for its effectiveness in context understanding, and XLNet permutation-based training is analyzed for its robust contextual comprehension. The experimental results reveal that GPT excels in generative tasks but is constrained by its unidirectional nature. BERT achieves superior accuracy in comprehension tasks but is computationally demanding and susceptible to pre-training bias. XLNet outperforms both GPT and BERT in accuracy and contextual understanding, though at the cost of increased complexity. The results offer a significant understanding of the effectiveness and applicability of these models, suggesting future research directions such as hybrid models and improvements in efficiency.

Relying on large pretrained language models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) for encoding and adding a simple prediction layer has led to impressive performance in many clinical natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this work, we present a novel extension to the Transformer architecture, by incorporating signature transform with the self-attention model. This architecture is added between embedding and prediction layers. Experiments on a new Swedish prescription data show the proposed architecture to be superior in two of the three information extraction tasks, comparing to baseline models. Finally, we evaluate two different embedding approaches between applying Multilingual BERT and translating the Swedish text to English then encode with a BERT model pretrained on clinical notes.

To address the insufficient expressive capabilities of traditional methods in assessing the development level of rural tourism, this study explores the fusion application of the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and the Back Propagation (BP) algorithm to enhance the accuracy and comprehensiveness of rural tourism development assessment. Firstly, this study introduces the BERT deep learning model and its applications in natural language processing, alongside the role of the BP algorithm in pattern recognition and predictive analysis. Subsequently, a framework for assessing rural tourism development levels, integrating BERT and the BP algorithm, is proposed. This framework collects multidimensional rural tourism-related data and utilizes the BERT model for sentiment analysis and topic extraction from textual data. Empirical analysis of rural tourism development in a specific region validates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate: (1) The model achieves an accuracy of 84.33% and an F1 score of 85.33% on the publicly available Laptop dataset, with a processing time of 20 s, significantly outperforming other methods. Compared to traditional approaches, the proposed method accurately captures correlations between textual information and numerical data, thereby enhancing the credibility and accuracy of assessment results. (2) From the ablation study results, it is evident that removing any component from the model leads to performance degradation. Specifically, removing the Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) reduces accuracy and F1 scores to 78.21% and 76.33% on the Laptop dataset, and to 85.10% and 70.45% on the Tourist_F dataset. Removing Text Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) reduces accuracy and F1 scores to 79.34% and 77.56% on the Laptop dataset, and to 86.25% and 72.11% on the Tourist_F dataset. The most significant performance decline occurs upon removing BERT, with accuracy and F1 scores decreasing to 70.14% and 66.43% on the Laptop dataset, and to 78.45% and 60.33% on the Tourist_F dataset. These results indicate that BiGcRU, TextCNN, and BERT each contribute significantly to the model’s performance. This study provides substantial support for advancing sustainable development in rural tourism, offering significant practical and innovative value.

Deep learning approaches, utilizing Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) and advanced fine-tuning techniques, have achieved state-of-the-art accuracies in the domain of term extraction from texts. However, BERT presents some limitations in that it primarily captures the semantic context relative to the surrounding text without considering how relevant or central a token is to the overall document content. There has also been research on the application of sequence labeling on contextualized embeddings; however, the existing methods often rely solely on local context for extracting key phrases from texts. To address these limitations, this study proposes a centrality-weighted BERT model for key phrase extraction from text using sequence labelling (CenBERT-SEQ). The proposed CenBERT-SEQ model utilizes BERT to represent terms with various contextual embedding architectures, and introduces a centrality-weighting layer that integrates document-level context into BERT. This layer leverages document embeddings to influence the importance of each term based on its relevance to the entire document. Finally, a linear classifier layer is employed to model the dependencies between the outputs, thereby enhancing the accuracy of the CenBERT-SEQ model. The proposed CenBERT-SEQ model was evaluated against the standard BERT base-uncased model using three Computer Science article datasets, namely, SemEval-2010, WWW, and KDD. The experimental results show that, although the CenBERT-SEQ and BERT-base models achieved higher and close comparable accuracy, the proposed CenBERT-SEQ model achieved higher precision, recall, and F1-score than the BERT-base model. Furthermore, a comparison of the proposed CenBERT-SEQ model to that of related studies revealed that the proposed CenBERT-SEQ model achieved a higher accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 95%, 97%, 91%, and 94%, respectively, than related studies, showing the superior capabilities of the CenBERT-SEQ model in keyphrase extraction from scientific documents.