Unlocking Potentials of NLP to Fight Against COVID-19 Crisis

Artificial Intelligence has proved its usefulness in this time of crisis. The technology is one of the greatest soldiers the world could ever get in the fight against coronavirus. AI along with its subsets is leveraging significant innovation across the healthcare sector and others as well to win against the pandemic. Where on the one hand computer vision is helping officials and government authorities to identify people who are not wearing a mask which is extremely critical in today's time, Natural Language Processing (NLP) powers chat programs to help detect the outbreak in the initial stages. NLP, moreover, is driving monitoring efforts in order to minimize the virus spread.

Alibaba's DAMO Academy, the group's global research program, has had another major breakthrough in the machine-reading capabilities that underpin success in artificial intelligence.

DAMO's Natural Language Processing (NLP) model topped the GLUE benchmark rankings, an industry table perceived as the most-important baseline test for the NLP model on March 3. Alibaba's model also significantly outperformed human baselines, marking a key milestone in the development of robust natural language understanding systems.

DAMO's existing model has already been deployed widely in Alibaba's ecosystem, powering its customer-service AI chatbot and the search engine on Alibaba's retail platforms, as well as anonymous healthcare data analysis. The model was used in the text analysis of medical records and epidemiological investigation by CDCs in different cities in China for fighting against COVID-19.

Besides, one of the most remarkable tech giants, IBM is advancing AI applications and services to offer ease to governments, healthcare firms and other companies struggling to handle the large influx of coronavirus-related phone calls.

According to ZDNet, IBM is combining Watson's Assistant (a question-answering computer system), the company's Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and Watson Discovery (AI tech) and calling it IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens.

The company claims there are so many coronavirus-related phone calls going towards governments that the queue is sometimes two hours long. Most of the questions, IBM believes, are "common", something an AI could handle easily.

The IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens pulls in data from various sources, including the US Centre for Disease Control & Prevention, as well as various local authorities. The tool will be available free for three months, in both phone and online format. A total of 13 languages are supported, and the counties where it could work include the UK, Poland, Spain, Italy, Finland, Greece, the US, and the Czech Republic.

Furthermore, in Boston, the US, it is claimed that the first public alert outside of China came from the automated HealthMap system at the Boston Children's Hospital. Using NLP to scan online news and social media reports, HealthMap sent out an alert about unidentified pneumonia cases in Wuhan at 11.12 pm Boston time on December 30. HealthMap uses a software mapping program from Mapbox Inc to analyze the data in the repository.

Apart from HealthMap, in Israel, Cobwebs Technologies is tracking mentions of the virus on the internet, social media posts and on twitter. The company claims that its insights were useful during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 when its tools helped identify people in need of urgent help. With COVID-19, the Cobweb platform tracks help requests and people in close contact with patients. While the company says this information will help authorities, there are also fears of unfair monitoring of people. It seems that NLP-powered AI is developing significant abilities in incident detection, which can have more applications going forward in the health sector.