NLP in the era of generative AI, cognitive sciences, and societal transformation
Join us at Mila in October for a three-day workshop to explore the transformative potential of language technologies and their implications for society.
This program is designed to provide decision-makers, policymakers and professional working in policy with a foundational understanding of AI technology.
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Publications
Inter-Brain Synchronization: From Neurobehavioral Correlation to Causal Explanation
Many population exposures in time-series analysis, including food marketing, exhibit a time-lagged association with population health outcom… (see more)es such as food purchasing. A common approach to measuring patterns of associations over different time lags relies on a finite-lag model, which requires correct specification of the maximum duration over which the lagged association extends. However, the maximum lag is frequently unknown due to the lack of substantive knowledge or the geographic variation of lag length. We describe a time-series analytical approach based on an infinite lag specification under a transfer function model that avoids the specification of an arbitrary maximum lag length. We demonstrate its application to estimate the lagged exposure-outcome association in food environmental research: display promotion of sugary beverages with lagged sales.
Natural language processing (NLP) and understanding aim to read from unformatted text to accomplish different tasks. While word embeddings l… (see more)earned by deep neural networks are widely used, the underlying linguistic and semantic structures of text pieces cannot be fully exploited in these representations. Graph is a natural way to capture the connections between different text pieces, such as entities, sentences, and documents. To overcome the limits in vector space models, researchers combine deep learning models with graph-structured representations for various tasks in NLP and text mining. Such combinations help to make full use of both the structural information in text and the representation learning ability of deep neural networks. In this chapter, we introduce the various graph representations that are extensively used in NLP, and show how different NLP tasks can be tackled from a graph perspective. We summarize recent research works on graph-based NLP, and discuss two case studies related to graph-based text clustering, matching, and multihop machine reading comprehension in detail. Finally, we provide a synthesis about the important open problems of this subfield.
The genome of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the pathogen that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)… (see more), has been sequenced at an unprecedented scale, leading to a tremendous amount of viral genome sequencing data. To understand the evolution of this virus in humans, and to assist in tracing infection pathways and designing preventive strategies, we present a set of computational tools that span phylogenomics, population genetics and machine learning approaches. To illustrate the utility of this toolbox, we detail an in depth analysis of the genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 in first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, using 329,854 high-quality consensus sequences published in the GISAID database during the pre-vaccination phase. We demonstrate that, compared to standard phylogenetic approaches, haplotype networks can be computed efficiently on much larger datasets, enabling real-time analyses. Furthermore, time series change of Tajima’s D provides a powerful metric of population expansion. Unsupervised learning techniques further highlight key steps in variant detection and facilitate the study of the role of this genomic variation in the context of SARS-CoV-2 infection, with Multiscale PHATE methodology identifying fine-scale structure in the SARS-CoV-2 genetic data that underlies the emergence of key lineages. The computational framework presented here is useful for real-time genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 and could be applied to any pathogen that threatens the health of worldwide populations of humans and other organisms.
Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias is a major public health burden – compounding over upcoming years due to longevity. Recently, … (see more)clinical evidence hinted at the experience of social isolation in expediting dementia onset. In 502,506 UK Biobank participants and 30,097 participants from the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging, we revisited traditional risk factors for developing dementia in the context of loneliness and lacking social support. Across these measures of subjective and objective social deprivation, we have identified strong links between individuals’ social capital and various indicators of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias risk, which replicated across both population cohorts. The quality and quantity of daily social encounters had deep connections with key aetiopathological factors, which represent 1) personal habits and lifestyle factors, 2) physical health, 3) mental health, and 4) societal and external factors. Our population-scale assessment suggest that social lifestyle determinants are linked to most neurodegeneration risk factors, highlighting them promising targets for preventive clinical action.