Ontology based text classifier for information extraction from coronavirus literature

The world is fighting an unprecedented coronavirus pandemic, and no country was prepared for it. Understanding the nature of this disease, when there is no available cure, is vital to encourage accurate clinical diagnosis and drug discovery prospects. When the amount of literature available is vast, it is important to represent the disease domain as completely as possible. The system should capture the morphology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics of the given literature, in order to extract useful information. Also, building a classifier for a particular domain suffers from a zero frequency issue. To solve this effectively, latent topics are extracted and semantically represented in ontology to build a text classifier for coronavirus literature. The classifier is equipped with 2 components-‘ontology’ and ‘machine learning data model’. Ontology helps to model the morphology and the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the text data through Latent Drichlet Allocation (LDA). It also preserves the contextual information in the document space, providing holistic feature representation facilities. To solve zero frequency and to extract actionable insights, a machine learning algorithm, Multi class Support Vector Machine (M-SVM), is incorporated with the ontology. It encodes features and achieves a classifier with highly discriminated classes. Further, to preserve contextual information space, and to enable data model formulation, the ontology is generated as a knowledge graph with their respective predefined classes. The resulting dataset can be used for clinical diagnosis and further research on the disease. Experimental results have shown that the proposed classifier outperforms the existing systems, with better domain representation. © 2021, Walailak University. All rights reserved.

Challenges for pregnant women seeking institutional care during the COVID-19 lockdown in India: A content analysis of online news reports.

India's nationwide lockdown to curtail the transmission of Covid-19 has given rise to concerns over the health system's response to maternal and child health (MCH) services. This paper aims to understand the challenges faced by pregnant women seeking institutional care during the lockdown. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of 54 online news reports, published in English and Hindi, between 25 March 2020 and 31 May 2020. They covered cases across 17 states in India and 16 maternal deaths. Three broad thematic categories of challenges for pregnant women emerged from the analysis: 1) physical access to health facilities, 2) admission to health facilities, and 3) lack of respectful maternity care during the lockdown. In conclusion, strengthening health systems and incorporating MCH into the Covid-19 response is imperative. Failure to provide quality MCH services during the lockdown has implications for the continuum of women's care, maternal mortality, and human rights.

The "invisible" among the marginalised: Do gender and intersectionality matter in the Covid-19 response?

The spread of Covid-19 and the lockdown have brought in acute deprivation for rural, marginalised communities with loss of wages, returnee migrants and additional state-imposed barriers to accessing facilities and public provisions. Patriarchal norms amplified in such a crisis along with gender-blind state welfare policies have rendered women in these communities "invisible". This has impacted their access to healthcare, nutrition and social security, and significantly increased their unpaid work burden. Several manifestations of violence, and mental stress have surfaced, diminishing their bare minimum agency and rights and impacting their overall health and wellbeing. This article looks at these gendered implications in the context of rural, tribal and high migrant areas of South Rajasthan. We have adopted an intersectional approach to highlight how intersections of several structures across multiple sites of power: the public, the private space of the home and the woman's intimate space, have reduced them to ultra-vulnerable groups.