Joint named entity recognition and relation extraction is an essential natural language processing task that aims to identify entities and extract the corresponding relations in an end-to-end manner. At present, compared with the named entity recognition task, the relation extraction task performs poorly on complex text. To solve this problem, we proposed a novel joint model named extracting Entity-Relations viaImproved Graph Attention networks (ERIGAT), which enhances the ability of the relation extraction task. In our proposed model, we introduced the graph attention network to extract entities and relations after graph embedding based on constructing symmetry relations. To mitigate the over-smoothing problem of graph convolutional networks, inspired by matrix factorization, we improved the graph attention network by designing a new multi-head attention mechanism and sharing attention parameters. To enhance the model robustness, we adopted the adversarial training to generate adversarial samples for training by adding tiny perturbations. Comparing with typical baseline models, we comprehensively evaluated our model by conducting experiments on an open domain dataset (CoNLL04) and a medical domain dataset (ADE). The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ERIGAT in extracting entity and relation information.

Background: Poor glycemic control with elevated levels of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) is associated with increased risk of cognitive impairment, with potentially varying effects between sexes. However, the causal impact of poor glycemic control on white matter brain aging in men and women is uncertain.Methods: We used two nonoverlapping data sets from UK Biobank cohort: gene-outcome group (with neuroimaging data, (N = 15,193; males/females: 7,101/8,092)) and gene-exposure group (without neuroimaging data, (N = 279,011; males/females: 122,638/156,373)). HbA1c was considered the exposure and adjusted “brain age gap” (BAG) was calculated on fractional anisotropy (FA) obtained from brain imaging as the outcome, thereby representing the difference between predicted and chronological age. The causal effects of HbA1c on adjusted BAG were studied using the generalized inverse variance weighted (gen-IVW) and other sensitivity analysis methods, including Mendelian randomization (MR)-weighted median, MR-pleiotropy residual sum and outlier, MR-using mixture models, and leave-one-out analysis.Results: We found that for every 6.75 mmol/mol increase in HbA1c, there was an increase of 0.49 (95% CI = 0.24, 0.74; p-value = 1.30 × 10⁻⁴) years in adjusted BAG. Subgroup analyses by sex and age revealed significant causal effects of HbA1c on adjusted BAG, specifically among men aged 60–73 (p-value = 2.37 × 10⁻⁸).Conclusion: Poor glycemic control has a significant causal effect on brain aging, and is most pronounced among older men aged 60–73 years, which provides insights between glycemic control and the susceptibility to age-related neurodegenerative diseases.

Object detection is an essential computer vision task that aims to detect target objects from an image. The traditional models are insufficient to generate a high-quality anchor box. To solve the problem, we propose a novel joint model called guided anchoring Region proposal networks and Cascading Grid Region Convolutional Neural Networks (RCGrid R-CNN), enhancing the ability of object detection. Our proposed model design is a joint object detection algorithm containing an anchor-based and an anchor-free branch in parallel and symmetry. In the anchor-based, we use nine-point spatial information fusion to obtain better anchor box location and introduce the shape prediction method of Guided Anchoring Region Proposal Networks (GA-RPN) to enhance the accuracy of the predicted anchor box. In the anchor-free branch, we introduce the Feature Selective Anchor-Free module (FSAF) to reduce the overlapping anchor boxes to obtain a more accurate anchor box. Furthermore, inspired by cascading theory, we cascade the new-designed detectors to improve the ability of object detection by setting a gradually increasing Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold. Compared with typical baseline models, we comprehensively evaluated our model by conducting experiments on two open datasets: Pascal VOC2007 and COCO2017. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of RCGrid R-CNN in producing a high-quality anchor box.

Drug entity and adverse effect relation extraction is a critical task that aims to recognize drug entity and extract adverse effect relation from the unstructured medical text. Many works have used statistical learning approach, traditional or new deep learning approach to solve similar pharmacovigilance problem. Recent works tended to employ the graph convolutional network to enhance the ability of drug and adverse effect information extraction. However, the injective problem generated by a single aggregator and the weak generalization of the summation aggregator cause the graph neural network lack the ability to extract sufficient relation information. To solve these problems, we propose a new end-to-end model named recognizing Drug entities and extracting Adverse effect relations via the Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation network (DAPNA). Moreover, we compared the DAPNA with baseline models on the Adverse Drug Effect (ADE) dataset using multiple metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the method proposed in this paper achieves state-of-the-art results and can be applied to other drug and adverse effect information extraction tasks.