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Call me cynical but isn't this a bit... Redundant? I mean sure, nlp, parse some papers and make some sort of search/q&a type of thing? Fine, whatever. Nice wor

Call me cynical but isn't this a bit... Redundant? I mean sure, nlp, parse some papers and make some sort of search/q&a type of thing? Fine, whatever. Nice work on organizing the data and to a fair degree taking care of the tedious pre-processing associated with any ml task but... Idk, I fail to see how this could help. Personally I'll fiddle around with it in my spare time but mostly for fun, I don't expect anything significantly useful to come out of it. On a higher level I feel like the success of the IT industry has made a lot of people feel like it is the answer to every possible question. And sure, bioinformatics is an incredible subject and I've invested a lot in studying it in my spare time in the last couple of years but __purely__ out of curiosity. But my 2 cents on the subject is that us(developers, ml engineers, etc) cannot provide the answer to the meaning of life. In this situation our safest course of action is to work from home as much as possible and avoid making decision that could potentially make the situation worse. Basically protect ourselves and those around us as much as possible. And by doing so, let people who have the adequate training, knowledge and experience take care of the situation. Sure, play around with it in your spare time, and if you come up with something - share it. But the whole "stand back boys, let us men handle it" mentality is what really bugs me. If anything history has taught us that this goes badly 990 out of 1000 times(to be more in lines with Bayesians). We all want the underdog to win the game but... Come on...

scastillo 7y ago
Yeah, some critics about this feeling improvised, but guess what? it IS improvisation. Remember what hickey says about improvising? (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Performance/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfo...) It is art and years of preparation right there performing real-time. So that guy criticizing is only auto declaring he is incapable of improvising on this matter.. and it's ok it's only for the best ones after all. It is called a challenge for a reason.
markholmes 7y ago
Redundant how? You say you don’t see how this could help, but the opposite - not doing it - is certain not to help. I don’t understand your criticism and cynicism here.
- axegon_ 7y ago
  Redundant as in anything that comes out of it will be nothing more than unsolicited help. In 3 key points: 1. Building something no one has asked for(the people trying to fight the virus). 2. Unlikely for someone to use whatever comes out of it. 3. It's a build-a-portfolio type of challenge at best.
gillesjacobs 7y ago
> I mean sure, nlp, parse some papers and make some sort of search/q&a type of thing? Fine, whatever. I think you severely underestimate the effort and expertise required for getting decent content-aware search, let alone a fully functional question-answering pipeline. These are their own subfields of research in text mining. The fact that you conflate these as if they were some trivial task on a new dataset shows your lack of understanding of the field. Biomedical text mining [1] is wide a subfield with plenty of open datasets and competitions such as the bi-annual ACL BioNLP workshop [1]. Furthermore existing knowledge-base creation and information extraction pipelines such as protein-protein interaction extraction, NER, event extraction, drug-drug-interaction minin, etc. could be applied to this novel dataset and provide useful insights for researchers and staff.
- deleted 7y ago
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- axegon_ 7y ago
  > These are their own subfields of research in text mining. The fact that you conflate these as if they were some trivial task on a new dataset shows your lack of understanding of the field. On the contrary, I've built many, but in this context I see it as a waste of time. As I said in another reply, it's a resume/portfolio task with no real world application.
PierredeFermat 7y ago
I very much agree here. Have recently ran part of the data through some NLP (incl. AWS Comprehend) and nothing signficant came out. Ended up doing simple free-text or keyword search and only landed on one interesting finding so far: https://twitter.com/yazijys/status/1240465780715683841 https://twitter.com/yazijys/status/1240465780715683841

scastillo 7y ago

Yeah, some critics about this feeling improvised, but guess what? it IS improvisation. Remember what hickey says about improvising? (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Performance/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfo...) It is art and years of preparation right there performing real-time. So that guy criticizing is only auto declaring he is incapable of improvising on this matter.. and it's ok it's only for the best ones after all. It is called a challenge for a reason.

markholmes 7y ago

Redundant how? You say you don’t see how this could help, but the opposite - not doing it - is certain not to help. I don’t understand your criticism and cynicism here.

axegon_ 7y ago
Redundant as in anything that comes out of it will be nothing more than unsolicited help. In 3 key points: 1. Building something no one has asked for(the people trying to fight the virus). 2. Unlikely for someone to use whatever comes out of it. 3. It's a build-a-portfolio type of challenge at best.

gillesjacobs 7y ago

> I mean sure, nlp, parse some papers and make some sort of search/q&a type of thing? Fine, whatever. I think you severely underestimate the effort and expertise required for getting decent content-aware search, let alone a fully functional question-answering pipeline. These are their own subfields of research in text mining. The fact that you conflate these as if they were some trivial task on a new dataset shows your lack of understanding of the field. Biomedical text mining [1] is wide a subfield with plenty of open datasets and competitions such as the bi-annual ACL BioNLP workshop [1]. Furthermore existing knowledge-base creation and information extraction pipelines such as protein-protein interaction extraction, NER, event extraction, drug-drug-interaction minin, etc. could be applied to this novel dataset and provide useful insights for researchers and staff.

deleted 7y ago
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axegon_ 7y ago
> These are their own subfields of research in text mining. The fact that you conflate these as if they were some trivial task on a new dataset shows your lack of understanding of the field. On the contrary, I've built many, but in this context I see it as a waste of time. As I said in another reply, it's a resume/portfolio task with no real world application.

PierredeFermat 7y ago

I very much agree here. Have recently ran part of the data through some NLP (incl. AWS Comprehend) and nothing signficant came out. Ended up doing simple free-text or keyword search and only landed on one interesting finding so far: https://twitter.com/yazijys/status/1240465780715683841 https://twitter.com/yazijys/status/1240465780715683841