“Advancing NLP for Timely and Actionable Feedback in Healthcare Conversations” | Veronica Perez-Rosas

Abstract: “Effective communication is crucial in healthcare for ensuring successful clinical interactions, as it affects how patients respond, the decisions being made by both patients and clinicians, and the outcomes of treatments. Recent developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) aim to improve and support these interactions within clinical settings. In this talk, I will discuss my research on offering timely and actionable evaluative feedback for mental healthcare interactions, addressing a crucial bottleneck in effective mental healthcare delivery. I will specifically focus on computational approaches for building conversational systems to aid in psychotherapy training, and present two NLP tasks to generate language-based feedback: (1) generating counselor responses following established counseling strategies, and (2) offering alternative rewrites to counseling trainees’ responses to refine their counseling skills. I will conclude the talk by outlining future directions towards my long-term agenda of building computational approaches that understand, model, and predict health behaviors while also being human-centric and scalable”

Bio: “Veronica Perez-Rosas is an Assistant Research Scientist at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of North Texas in 2014, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan until 2016. Her research interests include Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Affect Recognition, and Multimodal Processing of Human Behavior. Her research focuses on developing computational methods to analyze, recognize, and predict human behaviors during social interactions. She has authored papers in leading conferences and journals in Natural Language Processing and Multimodal Processing, has mentored numerous students in these research areas, and has served as workshop chair or area chair for multiple international conferences in the field.”