Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of digital health has grown significantly. One of the implementations of digital health is telemedicine to help patients remotely. This includes the...Show moreSince the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of digital health has grown significantly. One of the implementations of digital health is telemedicine to help patients remotely. This includes the implementation of Large Language Models (LLMs) to help reducing the workload of health workers and provide quicker support to patients. In the recent years, we have seen powerful Large Language Models that are able to pass many evaluation metrics such as Med-PaLM 2, which consists of the US Medical License Exam questions. However, the reliability of LLMs in the field of biomedicine remains questionable, and model interpretability is still a relatively developing field. This thesis explores the capabilities of Large Language Models in comprehending pain metaphors: metaphorical descriptions by patients of their experienced pain. As for the LLMs, GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, Gemini Pro, Llama-2 and BioMistral-7B are considered. We also explore if Large Language Models are able to explain the meaning behind the pain metaphors used. Using so-called elenchus and maieutic prompting schemes, we found that the models are somewhat capable to understand that the pain metaphors are not to be taken literally, especially if more context is given to the pain that is being described. However, there are instances where the models do not associate such pain sensations as metaphorical. The less context is provided by the user, the easier LLMs are distracted and the more they are likely to answer incorrectly. We found that GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-Turbo-0125, Gemini-1.0-Pro, and Llama-2-7b-chat are able to understand pain metaphors relatively well, whereas BioMistral-7B fails most of our tests. Our experiment also suggests that models trained on more generalized knowledge such as GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-Turbo, Gemini-1.0-Pro, Llama-2-7b-chat seem to be aware of what entails as linguistic metaphors, however, these models are not capable of transferring this knowledge to biomedicine, which means that it can understand metaphors, but it will have a difficult time to decide if a lexical item is a metaphor. For example, these models will not assign “stabbing pain” as a metaphor, instead suggesting that it is a pain sensation.Show less
This thesis studies the conceptualization of malaria in three cultural traditions: Hamar and Swahili, two indigenous East-African languages, and Western biomedicine. It will demonstrate that ideas...Show moreThis thesis studies the conceptualization of malaria in three cultural traditions: Hamar and Swahili, two indigenous East-African languages, and Western biomedicine. It will demonstrate that ideas on malaria vary significantly between these three cultures: in both Hamar and Swahili, malaria is included in a more general category of febrile illnesses, which becomes clear from the linguistic terms and constructions which are used to express ‘malaria’. In biomedicine, malaria is regarded as a potentially life-threatening disease which requires immediate treatment in hospital. If it progresses into severe or cerebral malaria, patients may show symptoms such as convulsions. This symptom is not related to malaria in many African cultures, but it is instead often categorized in a domain of spiritual illnesses and as such, requires different treatment, according to their traditional indigenous practices. An attempt will be made to clarify the Hamar, Swahili, and biomedical conceptualization of malaria from a linguistic point of view. This is done by investigating how malaria or febrile illness in general as well as related symptoms are expressed in Hamar and Swahili. For the biomedical perspective, it will not only be examined how malaria is conceptualized, but also the way in which traditional indigenous medical knowledge is considered. Moreover, an important aim of this thesis is to make a proposal of how to bring the different views together in an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation, in order to contribute to the global malaria struggle.Show less