Health Data Science Consortium
UIC’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science, which helps UIC researchers bring health breakthroughs into the world faster, held its first Health Data Science Consortium this semester.
The session featured four UIC computer science professors who work in natural language processing (NLP).
The field of NLP, a subset of AI, is focused on enabling computers to understand and generate human language. NLP is what allows conversational agents such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri to listen to queries and find answers, chatbots to function, and Chat-GPT to generate prose.
Distinguished Professor Bing Liu, Professor Cornelia Caragea, Assistant Professor Natalie Parde, and Assistant Professor Shweta Yadav described the conceptual framework of NLP, and the health science applications of the technology being investigated at UIC.
Liu’s work in sentiment analysis systems infers people’s opinions from text, especially on social media. This includes parsing online reviews, and determining whether they are authentic or fake. He has improved sentiment analysis tools with machine lifelong learning, algorithms that can transfer past knowledge to a current task to improve accuracy.
Caragea conducts research in NLP, AI, deep learning, and information retrieval. Deep learning models can supply wrong answers and can be overconfident in the accuracy of the answers they provide – something that would have minimal detrimental effect if someone is seeking the name of a band’s third album but could be harmful relating to healthcare matters.
Yadav is developing a robust question-answering system explicitly designed to meet the information needs of healthcare consumers. This includes providing faster responses to consumers’ healthcare questions by offering them reliable and trustworthy answers and providing a rationale for why these results were deemed most accurate.