Natural language research announcements

["Samdani, Rajhans" <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Dear All,

This week at AIIS, we have Wendy Chapman from UCSD. Following are the details 
of the talk.

Where: Siebel Center, 3405.

When: Friday 4 pm, October 26.

Title: Developing an Information Extraction and Visualization Toolkit

Abstract:
There are many barriers to developing NLP algorithms for clinical text and to 
applying NLP to clinical tasks. At UCSD, we are addressing some of the 
barriers through development of shared resources to assist developers in 
annotating text and evaluating NLP annotations. We are also developing shared 
resources to assist potential users of NLP in developing knowledge bases for 
particular clinical problems, in customizing NLP applications, and in 
visualizing the output of NLP annotations for clinical research and decision 
support. I will describe the Information Extraction and Visualization Toolkit 
(IE-Viz) we are developing to aid non-NLP experts in application of NLP to 
clinical tasks.

Bio:
After studying linguistics, Dr. Chapman received her PhD from the University 
of Utah in Medical Informatics with a research focus in natural language 
processing (NLP). She spent ten years at the University of Pittsburgh and 
moved to the University of California, San Diego in 2010.  Dr. Chapman's work 
has mainly addressed extraction of information from clinical reports, 
including identifying evidence of acute bacterial pneumonia from chest 
radiography reports and evidence of conditions relevant to detecting disease 
outbreaks from emergency department reports. She has developed an information 
extraction system called Topaz that maps text to concepts from a user's 
knowledge base and uses the ConText algorithm to assign attribute values for 
negation, experiencer, and historicity. Dr. Chapman led the American Medical 
Informatics Association NLP Working Group from 2008 until 2012 and is 
collaborating on efforts to develop shared conventions for NLP. She is 
working on several collaborative grants creating visualization tools for NLP 
output and developing infrastructure for NLP development and application.

Hoping to see you all!
Best,
Rajhans