A lexicon obtained and validated by a data-driven approach for organic residues valorization in emerging and developing countries

The text mining method presented in this paper was used for annotation of terms related to biological transformation and valorization of organic residues in agriculture in low and middle-income country. Specialized lexicon was obtained through different steps: corpus and extraction of terms, annotation of extracted terms, selection of relevant terms.

Evaluation of Geographical Distortions in Language Models: A Crucial Step Towards Equitable Representations

Language models now constitute essential tools for improving efficiency for many professional tasks such as writing, coding, or learning. For this reason, it is imperative to identify inherent biases. In the field of Natural Language Processing, five sources of bias are well-identified: data, annotation, representation, models, and research design. This study focuses on biases related to geographical knowledge. We explore the connection between geography and language models by highlighting their tendency to misrepresent spatial information, thus leading to distortions in the representation of geographical distances. This study introduces four indicators to assess these distortions, by comparing geographical and semantic distances. Experiments are conducted from these four indicators with ten widely used language models. Results underscore the critical necessity of inspecting and rectifying spatial biases in language models to ensure accurate and equitable representations.

An evaluation framework for comparing epidemic intelligence systems

In the context of Epidemic Intelligence, many Event-Based Surveillance (EBS) systems have been proposed in the literature to promote the early identification and characterization of potential health threats from online sources of any nature. Each EBS system has its own surveillance definitions and priorities, therefore this makes the task of selecting the most appropriate EBS system for a given situation a challenge for end-users. In this work, we propose a new evaluation framework to address this issue. It first transforms the raw input epidemiological event data into a set of normalized events with multi-granularity, then conducts a descriptive retrospective analysis based on four evaluation objectives: spatial, temporal, thematic and source analysis. We illustrate its relevance by applying it to an Avian Influenza dataset collected by a selection of EBS systems, and show how our framework allows identifying their strengths and drawbacks in terms of epidemic surveillance.

Annotation of epidemiological information in animal disease-related news articles: guidelines

This paper describes a method for annotation of epidemiological information in animal disease-related news articles. The annotation guidelines are generic and aim to embrace all animal or zoonotic infectious diseases, regardless of the pathogen involved or its way of transmission (e.g. vector-borne, airborne, by contact). The framework relies on the successive annotation of all the sentences from a news article. The annotator evaluates the sentences in a specific epidemiological context, corresponding to the publication of the news article.

How to define co-occurrence in different domains of study?

This position paper presents a comparative study of co-occurrences. Some similarities and differences in the definition exist depending on the research domain (e.g. linguistics, NLP, computer science). This paper discusses these points, and deals with the methodological aspects in order to identify co-occurrences in a multidisciplinary paradigm.

Preference Learning in Terminology Extraction: A ROC-based approach

A key data preparation step in Text Mining, Term Extraction selects the terms, or collocation of words, attached to specific concepts. In this paper, the task of extracting relevant collocations is achieved through a supervised learning algorithm, exploiting a few collocations manually labelled as relevant/irrelevant. The candidate terms are described along 13 standard statistical criteria measures. From these examples, an evolutionary learning algorithm termed Roger, based on the optimization of the Area under the ROC curve criterion, extracts an order on the candidate terms. The robustness of the approach is demonstrated on two real-world domain applications, considering different domains (biology and human resources) and different languages (English and French).