Predicting drug-target interaction (DTI) is critical in the drug discovery process. Despite remarkable advances in recent DTI models through the integration of representations from diverse drug and target encoders, such models often struggle to capture the fine-grained interactions between drugs and protein, i.e. the binding of specific drug atoms (or substructures) and key amino acids of proteins, which is crucial for understanding the binding mechanisms and optimising drug design. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel model, called FusionDTI, which uses a token-level Fusion module to effectively learn fine-grained information for Drug-Target Interaction. In particular, our FusionDTI model uses the SELFIES representation of drugs to mitigate sequence fragment invalidation and incorporates the structure-aware (SA) vocabulary of target proteins to address the limitation of amino acid sequences in structural information, additionally leveraging pre-trained language models extensively trained on large-scale biomedical datasets as encoders to capture the complex information of drugs and targets. Experiments on three well-known benchmark datasets show that our proposed FusionDTI model achieves the best performance in DTI prediction compared with seven existing state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, our case study indicates that FusionDTI could highlight the potential binding sites, enhancing the explainability of the DTI prediction.

Predictive models in natural language processing (NLP) have evolved from training models from scratch to fine-tuning pre-trained models with labelled data. An extreme form of this fine-tuning involves in-context learning (ICL), where the output of a pre-trained generative model (frozen decoder parameters) is controlled only with variations in the input strings (called instructions or prompts). An important component of ICL is the use of a small number of labelled data instances as examples in the prompt. While existing work uses a static number of examples during inference for each data instance, in this paper we propose a novel methodology of dynamically adapting the number of examples as per the data. This is analogous to the use of a variable-sized neighborhood in k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) classifier. In our proposed workflow of adaptive ICL (AICL), the number of demonstrations to employ during the inference on a particular data instance is predicted by the Softmax posteriors of a classifier. The parameters of this classifier are fitted on the optimal number of examples in ICL required to correctly infer the label of each instance in the training set with the hypothesis that a test instance that is similar to a training instance should use the same (or a closely matching) number of few-shot examples. Our experiments show that our AICL method results in improvement in text classification task on several standard datasets.

The use of pre-training is an emerging technique to enhance a neural model's performance, which has been shown to be effective for many neural language models such as BERT. This technique has also been used to enhance the performance of recommender systems. In such recommender systems, pre-training models are used to learn a better initialisation for both users and items. However, recent existing pre-trained recommender systems tend to only incorporate the user interaction data at the pre-training stage, making it difficult to deliver good recommendations, especially when the interaction data is sparse. To alleviate this common data sparsity issue, we propose to pre-train the recommendation model not only with the interaction data but also with other available information such as the social relations among users, thereby providing the recommender system with a better initialisation compared with solely relying on the user interaction data. We propose a novel recommendation model, the Social-aware Gaussian Pre-trained model (SGP), which encodes the user social relations and interaction data at the pre-training stage in a Graph Neural Network (GNN). Afterwards, in the subsequent fine-tuning stage, our SGP model adopts a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to factorise these pre-trained embeddings for further training, thereby benefiting the cold-start users from these pre-built social relations. Our extensive experiments on three public datasets show that, in comparison to 16 competitive baselines, our SGP model significantly outperforms the best baseline by upto 7.7% in terms of NDCG@10. In addition, we show that SGP permits to effectively alleviate the cold-start problem, especially when users newly register to the system through their friends' suggestions.

We propose a new uniform framework for text classification and ranking that can automate the process of identifying check-worthy sentences in political debates and speech transcripts. Our framework combines the semantic analysis of the sentences, with additional entity embeddings obtained through the identified entities within the sentences. In particular, we analyse the semantic meaning of each sentence using state-of-the-art neural language models such as BERT, ALBERT, and RoBERTa, while embeddings for entities are obtained from knowledge graph (KG) embedding models. Specifically, we instantiate our framework using five different language models, entity embeddings obtained from six different KG embedding models, as well as two combination methods leading to several Entity-Assisted neural language models. We extensively evaluate the effectiveness of our framework using two publicly available datasets from the CLEF' 2019 & 2020 CheckThat! Labs. Our results show that the neural language models significantly outperform traditional TF.IDF and LSTM methods. In addition, we show that the ALBERT model is consistently the most effective model among all the tested neural language models. Our entity embeddings significantly outperform other existing approaches from the literature that are based on similarity and relatedness scores between the entities in a sentence, when used alongside a KG embedding.

The tracking of citizens' reactions in social media during crises has attracted an increasing level of interest in the research community. In particular, sentiment analysis over social media posts can be regarded as a particularly useful tool, enabling civil protection and law enforcement agencies to more effectively respond during this type of situation. Prior work on sentiment analysis in social media during crises has applied well-known techniques for overall sentiment detection in posts. However, we argue that sentiment analysis of the overall post might not always be suitable, as it may miss the presence of more targeted sentiments, e.g. about the people and organizations involved (which we refer to as sentiment targets). Through a crowdsourcing study, we show that there are marked differences between the overall tweet sentiment and the sentiment expressed towards the subjects mentioned in tweets related to three crises events.

Twitter offers a phenomenal platform for the social sharing of information. We describe new resources that have been created in the context of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) to support the academic study of Twitter as a real-time information source. We formalize an information seeking task — real-time search — and offer a methodology for measuring system effectiveness. At the TREC 2011 Microblog Track, 58 research groups participated in the first ever evaluation of this task. We present data from the effort to illustrate and support our methodology.