Category: AI

  • Teaching an Old Trick to a Newer, Smarter Dog

    A context-sensitive neural spell checker for clinical text, built on BioClinical-ModernBERT Source code: github.com/eukairos/spellcheck  •  MIT License The problem with spell-checking clinical notes Clinical documentation is full of spelling errors. That is not a criticism of clinicians — it is a structural reality. Notes are written at speed, on shift, using a vocabulary that sits…

  • Building a Spell Screener for Clinical Text — And How You Can Adapt It for Any Domain

    Building a Spell Screener for Clinical Text — And How You Can Adapt It for Any Domain

    Clinical notes are peculiarly messy. Written under time pressure by busy clinicians, they’re full of abbreviations, shorthand, and — inevitably — typos. When you’re building natural language processing (NLP) pipelines that depend on these notes, these ‘features’ become a real problem. This post describes a tool Anthropic’s Claude helped me build to tackle that problem,…

  • The Vector Space Model for Text Processing

    This is a short post describing the geography of the Vector Space Model (VSM) of natural language processing (NLP). I initially wrote it as a section within a topic modelling post, but found the research material too extensive to fit into a single blog, so it is carved out here as a primer for NLP.…

  • Topic Modelling 3b: BERTopic Part 2

    In our last post, we looked at how BERTopic works. In the accompanying Jupyter notebook, we used BERTopic to extract topics from 5000 random PubMed abstracts from a dataset assembled by Huggingface user owaiskha9564. Here, we’ll run through the results, to illustrate what we can do with BERTopic. Discovered Topics After clustering and finetuning, the…

  • Topic Modeling 3a: BERTopic Part 1

    BERTopic is a sophisticated topic modelling technique that combines traditional natural language processing (NLP) and language models (LM). It takes a bit of digging to understand the workings of BERTopic, but I think it is worthwhile because the library seems to be maintained and continues to be updated with integrations to modern LM libraries like…

  • A Prescient Allegory

    “War With The Newts” is an eerily prescient novel from 1934 by a Czech political scientist, about how humans first exploited, and then were eventually subjugated by, sentient amphibians whose intelligence, while initially inferior to humans, developed at a faster rate than human intelligence. Substitute “Artificial Intelligence” for “Newts”, and you have a startlingly chilling…

  • How Is AI Transformative?

    Although there is a plethora of views on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) ranging from hostility and scepticism to adoration, there is probably wide agreement that AI is transformative for humans. How exactly does AI transform our society, our civilization? Is there any framework for structuring our thinking and analysis on AI’s transformative impact…

  • Adjacent Possibles

    Welcome to Eukairos, a collection of musings at the confluence of artificial intelligence (AI), data management and healthcare.  The term eukairos is derived from the Greek ευκαιρός, loosely meaning ‘timeliness’ or ‘opportunity’.  The short explanation for the site’s name is that English-language domain names are pretty much saturated in the .sg domain. The more involved…