Melax Tech, a world leader in biomedical Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, announced the securing of a Phase One SBIR award focused on developing real-time surveillance of vaccine misinformation from social media platforms using ontology and NLP.
The Phase One SBIR grant, valued at $300,000, has been awarded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to develop innovative and cutting-edge computational algorithms, including semantic technologies and NLP algorithms to model, extract and synthesize vaccine misinformation from multiple popular social media sources.
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“This is a very real topic affecting culture at present and shows that we as a collective business and group of experts continue to be on the cutting-edge of science in the NLP and AI domain,” said Andre Pontin, CEO at Melax Tech.
Dr. Jingcheng Du, Director of NLP research at Melax Tech, noted, “A major driver for vaccine hesitancy is widespread and uncontrolled vaccine misinformation. As one of its first kinds, we will build deep learning-based NLP algorithms to extract and normalize vaccine misinformation from social media. Furthermore, to engage a broad community, we will develop an interactive visualization to synthesize the vaccine misinformation into a comprehensible format. We are very excited and enthusiastic about this project and its potential to improve public health.”
Melax Tech empowers businesses, laboratories, and other life sciences organizations to use natural language processing (NLP) technology to unlock unstructured textual data. Clients use our AI-powered software to uncover insights, make decisions, and research breakthroughs. With a team whose expertise encompasses more than 20 years of experience in developing clinical NLP technology, Melax Tech has ranked first in a dozen international NLP challenges. This award-winning software is used in computer-assisted medical coding, clinical decision support, surveillance, care quality, patient safety reporting, and client-defined projects.