Understanding how online media frame issues is crucial due to their impact on public opinion. Research on framing using natural language processing techniques mainly focuses on specific content features in messages and neglects their narrative elements. Also, the distinction between framing in different sources remains an understudied problem. We address those issues and investigate how the framing of health-related topics, such as COVID-19 and other diseases, differs between conspiracy and mainstream websites. We incorporate narrative information into the framing analysis by introducing a novel frame extraction approach based on semantic graphs. We find that health-related narratives in conspiracy media are predominantly framed in terms of beliefs, while mainstream media tend to present them in terms of science. We hope our work offers new ways for a more nuanced frame analysis.

Gaussian graphical models emerge in a wide range of fields. They model the statistical relationships between variables as a graph, where an edge between two variables indicates conditional dependence. Unfortunately, well-established estimators, such as the graphical lasso or neighborhood selection, are known to be susceptible to a high prevalence of false edge detections. False detections may encourage inaccurate or even incorrect scientific interpretations, with major implications in applications, such as biomedicine or healthcare. In this paper, we introduce a nodewise variable selection approach to graph learning and provably control the false discovery rate of the selected edge set at a self-estimated level. A novel fusion method of the individual neighborhoods outputs an undirected graph estimate. The proposed method is parameter-free and does not require tuning by the user. Benchmarks against competing false discovery rate controlling methods in numerical experiments considering different graph topologies show a significant gain in performance.

Contrary to the use of genetic programming, the neural network approach to symbolic regression can scale well with high input dimension and leverage gradient methods for faster equation searching. Common ways of constraining expression complexity have relied on multistage pruning methods with fine-tuning, but these often lead to significant performance loss. In this work, we propose SymbolNet, a neural network approach to symbolic regression in a novel framework that enables dynamic pruning of model weights, input features, and mathematical operators in a single training, where both training loss and expression complexity are optimized simultaneously. We introduce a sparsity regularization term per pruning type, which can adaptively adjust its own strength and lead to convergence to a target sparsity level. In contrast to most existing symbolic regression methods that cannot efficiently handle datasets with more than $O$(10) inputs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on the LHC jet tagging task (16 inputs), MNIST (784 inputs), and SVHN (3072 inputs).

A rational design of new therapeutic drugs aims to find a molecular structure with desired biological functionality, e.g., an ability to activate or suppress a specific protein via binding to it. Molecular docking is a common technique for evaluating protein-molecule interactions. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to generating molecules with the docking score (DS) as a reward. In this work, we reproduce, scrutinize and improve the recent RL model for molecule generation called FREED (Yang et al., 2021). Extensive evaluation of the proposed method reveals several limitations and challenges despite the outstanding results reported for three target proteins. Our contributions include fixing numerous implementation bugs and simplifying the model while increasing its quality, significantly extending experiments, and conducting an accurate comparison with current state-of-the-art methods for protein-conditioned molecule generation. We show that the resulting fixed model is capable of producing molecules with superior docking scores compared to alternative approaches.

The growing trends in automation, Internet of Things, big data and cloud computing technologies have led to the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), where it is possible to visualize and identify patterns and insights, which results in a better understanding of the data and can improve the manufacturing process. However, many times, the task of data exploration results difficult for manufacturing experts because they might be interested in analyzing also data that does not appear in pre-designed visualizations and therefore they must be assisted by Information Technology experts. In this paper, we present a proposal materialized in a semantic-based visual query system developed for a real Industry 4.0 scenario that allows domain experts to explore and visualize data in a friendly way. The main novelty of the system is the combined use that it makes of captured data that are semantically annotated first, and a 2D customized digital representation of a machine that is also linked with semantic descriptions. Those descriptions are expressed using terms of an ontology, where, among others, the sensors that are used to capture indicators about the performance of a machine that belongs to a Industry 4.0 scenario have been modeled. Moreover, this semantic description allows to: formulate queries at a higher level of abstraction, provide customized graphical visualizations of the results based on the format and nature of the data, and download enriched data enabling further types of analysis.

Yes/No or polar questions represent one of the main linguistic question categories. They consist of a main interrogative clause, for which the answer is binary (assertion or negation). Polar questions and answers (PQA) represent a valuable knowledge resource present in many community and other curated QA sources, such as forums or e-commerce applications. Using answers to polar questions alone in other contexts is not trivial. Answers are contextualized, and presume that the interrogative question clause and any shared knowledge between the asker and answerer are provided. We address the problem of controllable rewriting of answers to polar questions into decontextualized and succinct factual statements. We propose a Transformer sequence to sequence model that utilizes soft-constraints to ensure controllable rewriting, such that the output statement is semantically equivalent to its PQA input. Evaluation on three separate PQA datasets as measured through automated and human evaluation metrics show that our proposed approach achieves the best performance when compared to existing baselines.

Word sense disambiguation primarily addresses the lexical ambiguity of common words based on a predefined sense inventory. Conversely, proper names are usually considered to denote an ad-hoc real-world referent. Once the reference is decided, the ambiguity is purportedly resolved. However, proper names also exhibit ambiguities through appellativization, i.e., they act like common words and may denote different aspects of their referents. We proposed to address the ambiguities of proper names through the light of regular polysemy, which we formalized as dot objects. This paper introduces a combined word sense disambiguation (WSD) model for disambiguating common words against Chinese Wordnet (CWN) and proper names as dot objects. The model leverages the flexibility of a gloss-based model architecture, which takes advantage of the glosses and example sentences of CWN. We show that the model achieves competitive results on both common and proper nouns, even on a relatively sparse sense dataset. Aside from being a performant WSD tool, the model further facilitates the future development of the lexical resource.

In the field of scientific computing, many problem-solving approaches tend to focus only on the process and final outcome, even in AI for science, there is a lack of deep multimodal information mining behind the data, missing a multimodal framework akin to that in the image-text domain. In this paper, we take Symbolic Regression(SR) as our focal point and, drawing inspiration from the BLIP model in the image-text domain, propose a scientific computing multimodal framework based on Function Images (Funcimg) and Operation Tree Sequence (OTS), named Bootstrapping OTS-Funcimg Pre-training Model (Botfip). In SR experiments, we validate the advantages of Botfip in low-complexity SR problems, showcasing its potential. As a MED framework, Botfip holds promise for future applications in a broader range of scientific computing problems.

The Circle of Willis (CoW) is an important network of arteries connecting major circulations of the brain. Its vascular architecture is believed to affect the risk, severity, and clinical outcome of serious neuro-vascular diseases. However, characterizing the highly variable CoW anatomy is still a manual and time-consuming expert task. The CoW is usually imaged by two angiographic imaging modalities, magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and computed tomography angiography (CTA), but there exist limited public datasets with annotations on CoW anatomy, especially for CTA. Therefore we organized the TopCoW Challenge in 2023 with the release of an annotated CoW dataset. The TopCoW dataset was the first public dataset with voxel-level annotations for thirteen possible CoW vessel components, enabled by virtual-reality (VR) technology. It was also the first large dataset with paired MRA and CTA from the same patients. TopCoW challenge formalized the CoW characterization problem as a multiclass anatomical segmentation task with an emphasis on topological metrics. We invited submissions worldwide for the CoW segmentation task, which attracted over 140 registered participants from four continents. The top performing teams managed to segment many CoW components to Dice scores around 90%, but with lower scores for communicating arteries and rare variants. There were also topological mistakes for predictions with high Dice scores. Additional topological analysis revealed further areas for improvement in detecting certain CoW components and matching CoW variant topology accurately. TopCoW represented a first attempt at benchmarking the CoW anatomical segmentation task for MRA and CTA, both morphologically and topologically.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for training segmentation models on decentralized medical data, owing to its privacy-preserving property. However, existing research overlooks the prevalent annotation noise encountered in real-world medical datasets, which limits the performance ceilings of FL. In this paper, we, for the first time, identify and tackle this problem. For problem formulation, we propose a contour evolution for modeling non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) noise across pixels within each client and then extend it to the case of multi-source data to form a heterogeneous noise model (i.e., Non-IID annotation noise across clients). For robust learning from annotations with such two-level Non-IID noise, we emphasize the importance of data quality in model aggregation, allowing high-quality clients to have a greater impact on FL. To achieve this, we propose Federated learning with Annotation quAlity-aware AggregatIon, named FedA3I, by introducing a quality factor based on client-wise noise estimation. Specifically, noise estimation at each client is accomplished through the Gaussian mixture model and then incorporated into model aggregation in a layer-wise manner to up-weight high-quality clients. Extensive experiments on two real-world medical image segmentation datasets demonstrate the superior performance of FedA$^3$I against the state-of-the-art approaches in dealing with cross-client annotation noise. The code is available at https://github.com/wnn2000/FedAAAI.