Title: Understanding Patient Language for Healthcare

Speaker: Prof. Hyeju Jang @ Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis

Time : 2022 Dec 14th 15:00 ~ 16:00

Location: Hybrid

Online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84773514330 (Passcode 1214)

In-person: 26310

Language: Korean speech & English slides

Abstract: 

Investigating patient language allows learning the concerns and needs of patients, and could even help diagnosis of certain diseases. My research applies natural language processing techniques to the healthcare domain to better understand language in human communication, with the goal of developing new interventions to improve the current healthcare system. In this talk, I will discuss several lines of work addressing some important issues that occur when we apply language technologies to healthcare. First, I will describe how language technologies can be used to examine what people say about a particular disease in social media, e.g., COVID-19. Second, I will introduce how patient conditions are reflected in their metaphor usage, and explain how we detect metaphors in discourse. Lastly, in order to rely on predictions of machine learning models, interpretable AI is crucial. I will present work on improving interpretability of machine learning models for healthcare tasks. I will conclude by discussing future directions.

Bio:

Dr. Hyeju Jang is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Previously, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests are in AI, natural language processing (NLP), and text mining for health care. Specifically, her current research is about applying NLP and text mining to the healthcare domain in order to help disease management by processing patient-generated language. Her work has been published in leading NLP and medical conferences/journals. She was awarded the Health System Impact Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.