A Morse Transform for Drug Discovery

We introduce a new ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS) framework that uses piecewise linear (PL) Morse theory to predict ligand binding potential. We model ligands as simplicial complexes via a pruned Delaunay triangulation, and catalogue the critical points across multiple directional height functions. This produces a rich feature vector, consisting of crucial topological features -- peaks, troughs, and saddles -- that characterise ligand surfaces relevant to binding interactions. Unlike contemporary LBVS methods that rely on computationally-intensive deep neural networks, we require only a lightweight classifier. The Morse theoretic approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets while offering an interpretable feature vector and scalable method for ligand prioritization in early-stage drug discovery.

NER- RoBERTa: Fine-Tuning RoBERTa for Named Entity Recognition (NER) within low-resource languages

Nowadays, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an important tool for most people's daily life routines, ranging from understanding speech, translation, named entity recognition (NER), and text categorization, to generative text models such as ChatGPT. Due to the existence of big data and consequently large corpora for widely used languages like English, Spanish, Turkish, Persian, and many more, these applications have been developed accurately. However, the Kurdish language still requires more corpora and large datasets to be included in NLP applications. This is because Kurdish has a rich linguistic structure, varied dialects, and a limited dataset, which poses unique challenges for Kurdish NLP (KNLP) application development. While several studies have been conducted in KNLP for various applications, Kurdish NER (KNER) remains a challenge for many KNLP tasks, including text analysis and classification. In this work, we address this limitation by proposing a methodology for fine-tuning the pre-trained RoBERTa model for KNER. To this end, we first create a Kurdish corpus, followed by designing a modified model architecture and implementing the training procedures. To evaluate the trained model, a set of experiments is conducted to demonstrate the performance of the KNER model using different tokenization methods and trained models. The experimental results show that fine-tuned RoBERTa with the SentencePiece tokenization method substantially improves KNER performance, achieving a 12.8% improvement in F1-score compared to traditional models, and consequently establishes a new benchmark for KNLP.

Diagnosing COVID-19 Pneumonia from X-Ray and CT Images using Deep Learning and Transfer Learning Algorithms

COVID-19 (also known as 2019 Novel Coronavirus) first emerged in Wuhan, China and spread across the globe with unprecedented effect and has now become the greatest crisis of the modern era. The COVID-19 has proved much more pervasive demands for diagnosis that has driven researchers to develop more intelligent, highly responsive and efficient detection methods. In this work, we focus on proposing AI tools that can be used by radiologists or healthcare professionals to diagnose COVID-19 cases in a quick and accurate manner. However, the lack of a publicly available dataset of X-ray and CT images makes the design of such AI tools a challenging task. To this end, this study aims to build a comprehensive dataset of X-rays and CT scan images from multiple sources as well as provides a simple but an effective COVID-19 detection technique using deep learning and transfer learning algorithms. In this vein, a simple convolution neural network (CNN) and modified pre-trained AlexNet model are applied on the prepared X-rays and CT scan images dataset. The result of the experiments shows that the utilized models can provide accuracy up to 98 % via pre-trained network and 94.1 % accuracy by using the modified CNN.