Qian Li

Forrest Sheng Bao, Youbiao He, Jie Liu et al.

The COVID-19 is sweeping the world with deadly consequences. Its contagious nature and clinical similarity to other pneumonias make separating subjects contracted with COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 viral pneumonia a priority and a challenge. However, COVID-19 testing has been greatly limited by the availability and cost of existing methods, even in developed countries like the US. Intrigued by the wide availability of routine blood tests, we propose to leverage them for COVID-19 testing using the power of machine learning. Two proven-robust machine learning model families, random forests (RFs) and support vector machines (SVMs), are employed to tackle the challenge. Trained on blood data from 208 moderate COVID-19 subjects and 86 subjects with non-COVID-19 moderate viral pneumonia, the best result is obtained in an SVM-based classifier with an accuracy of 84%, a sensitivity of 88%, a specificity of 80%, and a precision of 92%. The results are found explainable from both machine learning and medical perspectives. A privacy-protected web portal is set up to help medical personnel in their practice and the trained models are released for developers to further build other applications. We hope our results can help the world fight this pandemic and welcome clinical verification of our approach on larger populations.

Zheng Fang, Yanan Cao, Dongjie Zhang et al.

Entity linking is the task of aligning mentions to corresponding entities in a given knowledge base. Previous studies have highlighted the necessity for entity linking systems to capture the global coherence. However, there are two common weaknesses in previous global models. First, most of them calculate the pairwise scores between all candidate entities and select the most relevant group of entities as the final result. In this process, the consistency among wrong entities as well as that among right ones are involved, which may introduce noise data and increase the model complexity. Second, the cues of previously disambiguated entities, which could contribute to the disambiguation of the subsequent mentions, are usually ignored by previous models. To address these problems, we convert the global linking into a sequence decision problem and propose a reinforcement learning model which makes decisions from a global perspective. Our model makes full use of the previous referred entities and explores the long-term influence of current selection on subsequent decisions. We conduct experiments on different types of datasets, the results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art systems and has better generalization performance.