Hua He

Yiwei Yan, Hao Li, Hua He et al.

Online medical consultations generate large volumes of conversational health data that often embed protected health information, requiring robust methods to classify data categories and assign risk levels in line with policies and practice. However, existing approaches lack unified standards and reliable automated methods to fulfill sensitivity classification for such conversational health data. This study presents a large language model-based extraction pipeline, SALP-CG, for classifying and grading privacy risks in online conversational health data. We concluded health-data classification and grading rules in accordance with GB/T 39725-2020. Combining few-shot guidance, JSON Schema constrained decoding, and deterministic high-risk rules, the backend-agnostic extraction pipeline achieves strong category compliance and reliable sensitivity across diverse LLMs. On the MedDialog-CN benchmark, models yields robust entity counts, high schema compliance, and accurate sensitivity grading, while the strongest model attains micro-F1=0.900 for maximum-level prediction. The category landscape stratified by sensitivity shows that Level 2-3 items dominate, enabling re-identification when combined; Level 4-5 items are less frequent but carry outsize harm. SALP-CG reliably helps classify categories and grading sensitivity in online conversational health data across LLMs, offering a practical method for health data governance. Code is available at https://github.com/dommii1218/SALP-CG.

Hongzhao Li, Hongyu Wang, Xia Sun et al.

Medical report generation automates radiology descriptions from images, easing the burden on physicians and minimizing errors. However, current methods lack structured outputs and physician interactivity for clear, clinically relevant reports. Our method introduces a prompt-guided approach to generate structured chest X-ray reports using a pre-trained large language model (LLM). First, we identify anatomical regions in chest X-rays to generate focused sentences that center on key visual elements, thereby establishing a structured report foundation with anatomy-based sentences. We also convert the detected anatomy into textual prompts conveying anatomical comprehension to the LLM. Additionally, the clinical context prompts guide the LLM to emphasize interactivity and clinical requirements. By integrating anatomy-focused sentences and anatomy/clinical prompts, the pre-trained LLM can generate structured chest X-ray reports tailored to prompted anatomical regions and clinical contexts. We evaluate using language generation and clinical effectiveness metrics, demonstrating strong performance.

Xiaowen Cao, Li Xing, Elham Majd et al.

Background: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) yields valuable insights about gene expression and gives critical information about complex tissue cellular composition. In the analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing, the annotations of cell subtypes are often done manually, which is time-consuming and irreproducible. Garnett is a cell-type annotation software based the on elastic net method. Besides cell-type annotation, supervised machine learning methods can also be applied to predict other cell phenotypes from genomic data. Despite the popularity of such applications, there is no existing study to systematically investigate the performance of those supervised algorithms in various sizes of scRNA-seq data sets. Methods and Results: This study evaluates 13 popular supervised machine learning algorithms to classify cell phenotypes, using published real and simulated data sets with diverse cell sizes. The benchmark contained two parts. In the first part, we used real data sets to assess the popular supervised algorithms' computing speed and cell phenotype classification performance. The classification performances were evaluated using AUC statistics, F1-score, precision, recall, and false-positive rate. In the second part, we evaluated gene selection performance using published simulated data sets with a known list of real genes. Conclusion: The study outcomes showed that ElasticNet with interactions performed best in small and medium data sets. NB was another appropriate method for medium data sets. In large data sets, XGB works excellent. Ensemble algorithms were not significantly superior to individual machine learning methods. Adding interactions to ElasticNet can help, and the improvement was significant in small data sets.

Tongfei Chen, Chetan Naik, Hua He et al.

Tracking the state of the conversation is a central component in task-oriented spoken dialogue systems. One such approach for tracking the dialogue state is slot carryover, where a model makes a binary decision if a slot from the context is relevant to the current turn. Previous work on the slot carryover task used models that made independent decisions for each slot. A close analysis of the results show that this approach results in poor performance over longer context dialogues. In this paper, we propose to jointly model the slots. We propose two neural network architectures, one based on pointer networks that incorporate slot ordering information, and the other based on transformer networks that uses self attention mechanism to model the slot interdependencies. Our experiments on an internal dialogue benchmark dataset and on the public DSTC2 dataset demonstrate that our proposed models are able to resolve longer distance slot references and are able to achieve competitive performance.

Chengxi Ye, Matthew Evanusa, Hua He et al.

Convolution is a central operation in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which applies a kernel to overlapping regions shifted across the image. However, because of the strong correlations in real-world image data, convolutional kernels are in effect re-learning redundant data. In this work, we show that this redundancy has made neural network training challenging, and propose network deconvolution, a procedure which optimally removes pixel-wise and channel-wise correlations before the data is fed into each layer. Network deconvolution can be efficiently calculated at a fraction of the computational cost of a convolution layer. We also show that the deconvolution filters in the first layer of the network resemble the center-surround structure found in biological neurons in the visual regions of the brain. Filtering with such kernels results in a sparse representation, a desired property that has been missing in the training of neural networks. Learning from the sparse representation promotes faster convergence and superior results without the use of batch normalization. We apply our network deconvolution operation to 10 modern neural network models by replacing batch normalization within each. Extensive experiments show that the network deconvolution operation is able to deliver performance improvement in all cases on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, Cityscapes, and ImageNet datasets.

Wuwei Lan, Siyu Qiu, Hua He et al.

A major challenge in paraphrase research is the lack of parallel corpora. In this paper, we present a new method to collect large-scale sentential paraphrases from Twitter by linking tweets through shared URLs. The main advantage of our method is its simplicity, as it gets rid of the classifier or human in the loop needed to select data before annotation and subsequent application of paraphrase identification algorithms in the previous work. We present the largest human-labeled paraphrase corpus to date of 51,524 sentence pairs and the first cross-domain benchmarking for automatic paraphrase identification. In addition, we show that more than 30,000 new sentential paraphrases can be easily and continuously captured every month at ~70% precision, and demonstrate their utility for downstream NLP tasks through phrasal paraphrase extraction. We make our code and data freely available.

Jinfeng Rao, Hua He, Haotian Zhang et al.

Time is an important relevance signal when searching streams of social media posts. The distribution of document timestamps from the results of an initial query can be leveraged to infer the distribution of relevant documents, which can then be used to rerank the initial results. Previous experiments have shown that kernel density estimation is a simple yet effective implementation of this idea. This paper explores an alternative approach to mining temporal signals with recurrent neural networks. Our intuition is that neural networks provide a more expressive framework to capture the temporal coherence of neighboring documents in time. To our knowledge, we are the first to integrate lexical and temporal signals in an end-to-end neural network architecture, in which existing neural ranking models are used to generate query-document similarity vectors that feed into a bidirectional LSTM layer for temporal modeling. Our results are mixed: existing neural models for document ranking alone yield limited improvements over simple baselines, but the integration of lexical and temporal signals yield significant improvements over competitive temporal baselines.

Jinfeng Rao, Ferhan Ture, Hua He et al.

We tackle the novel problem of navigational voice queries posed against an entertainment system, where viewers interact with a voice-enabled remote controller to specify the program to watch. This is a difficult problem for several reasons: such queries are short, even shorter than comparable voice queries in other domains, which offers fewer opportunities for deciphering user intent. Furthermore, ambiguity is exacerbated by underlying speech recognition errors. We address these challenges by integrating word- and character-level representations of the queries and by modeling voice search sessions to capture the contextual dependencies in query sequences. Both are accomplished with a probabilistic framework in which recurrent and feedforward neural network modules are organized in a hierarchical manner. From a raw dataset of 32M voice queries from 2.5M viewers on the Comcast Xfinity X1 entertainment system, we extracted data to train and test our models. We demonstrate the benefits of our hybrid representation and context-aware model, which significantly outperforms models without context as well as the current deployed product.