A novel few-shot learning based multi-modality fusion model for COVID-19 rumor detection from online social media.

BACKGROUND: Rumor detection is a popular research topic in natural language processing and data mining. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, related rumors have been widely posted and spread on online social media, which have seriously affected people's daily lives, national economy, social stability, etc. It is both theoretically and practically essential to detect and refute COVID-19 rumors fast and effectively. As COVID-19 was an emergent event that was outbreaking drastically, the related rumor instances were very scarce and distinct at its early stage. This makes the detection task a typical few-shot learning problem. However, traditional rumor detection techniques focused on detecting existed events with enough training instances, so that they fail to detect emergent events such as COVID-19. Therefore, developing a new few-shot rumor detection framework has become critical and emergent to prevent outbreaking rumors at early stages. METHODS: This article focuses on few-shot rumor detection, especially for detecting COVID-19 rumors from Sina Weibo with only a minimal number of labeled instances. We contribute a Sina Weibo COVID-19 rumor dataset for few-shot rumor detection and propose a few-shot learning-based multi-modality fusion model for few-shot rumor detection. A full microblog consists of the source post and corresponding comments, which are considered as two modalities and fused with the meta-learning methods. RESULTS: Experiments of few-shot rumor detection on the collected Weibo dataset and the PHEME public dataset have shown significant improvement and generality of the proposed model.

One for "All": a unified model for fine-grained sentiment analysis under three tasks.

BACKGROUND: Fine-grained sentiment analysis is used to interpret consumers' sentiments, from their written comments, towards specific entities on specific aspects. Previous researchers have introduced three main tasks in this field (ABSA, TABSA, MEABSA), covering all kinds of social media data (e.g., review specific, questions and answers, and community-based). In this paper, we identify and address two common challenges encountered in these three tasks, including the low-resource problem and the sentiment polarity bias. METHODS: We propose a unified model called PEA by integrating data augmentation methodology with the pre-trained language model, which is suitable for all the ABSA, TABSA and MEABSA tasks. Two data augmentation methods, which are entity replacement and dual noise injection, are introduced to solve both challenges at the same time. An ensemble method is also introduced to incorporate the results of the basic RNN-based and BERT-based models. RESULTS: PEA shows significant improvements on all three fine-grained sentiment analysis tasks when compared with state-of-the-art models. It also achieves comparable results with what the baseline models obtain while using only 20% of their training data, which demonstrates its extraordinary performance under extreme low-resource conditions.

Automated Classification of Apoptosis in Phase Contrast Microscopy Using Capsule Network.

Automatic and accurate classification of apoptosis, or programmed cell death, will facilitate cell biology research. The state-of-the-art approaches in apoptosis classification use deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, these networks are not efficient in encoding the part-whole relationships, thus requiring a large number of training samples to achieve robust generalization. This paper proposes an efficient variant of capsule networks (CapsNets) as an alternative to CNNs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CapsNets achieve competitive performances in target cell apoptosis classification, while significantly outperforming CNNs when the number of training samples is small. To utilize temporal information within microscopy videos, we propose a recurrent CapsNet constructed by stacking a CapsNet and a bi-directional long short-term recurrent structure. Our experiments show that when considering temporal constraints, the recurrent CapsNet achieves 93.8% accuracy and makes significantly more consistent prediction than NNs.

TIMING 2.0: high-throughput single-cell profiling of dynamic cell-cell interactions by time-lapse imaging microscopy in nanowell grids.

MOTIVATION: Automated profiling of cell-cell interactions from high-throughput time-lapse imaging microscopy data of cells in nanowell grids (TIMING) has led to fundamental insights into cell-cell interactions in immunotherapy. This application note aims to enable widespread adoption of TIMING by (i) enabling the computations to occur on a desktop computer with a graphical processing unit instead of a server; (ii) enabling image acquisition and analysis to occur in the laboratory avoiding network data transfers to/from a server and (iii) providing a comprehensive graphical user interface. RESULTS: On a desktop computer, TIMING 2.0 takes 5 s/block/image frame, four times faster than our previous method on the same computer, and twice as fast as our previous method (TIMING) running on a Dell PowerEdge server. The cell segmentation accuracy (f-number = 0.993) is superior to our previous method (f-number = 0.821). A graphical user interface provides the ability to inspect the video analysis results, make corrective edits efficiently (one-click editing of an entire nanowell video sequence in 5-10 s) and display a summary of the cell killing efficacy measurements. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Open source Python software (GPL v3 license), instruction manual, sample data and sample results are included with the Supplement (https://github.com/RoysamLab/TIMING2). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.