**Successful participation of IMFD researcher Jocelyn Dunstan at NAACL-HLT 2024**
June, 2024.- Languages are the heart and soul of cultural identity and communication, and there is no place where this is more evident than in the vibrant landscape of Latin America and the Caribbean: with this idea, the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics – Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2024) began.
This conference brings together leading researchers from across the American continent in the field of Computational Linguistics (ACL), the interdisciplinary field that deals with the processing by machines (computers) of the language spoken by humans.
IMFD Researcher Jocelyn Dustan Escudero, IMC – DCC UC faculty member and IMFD researcher, took part along with her team in the conference activities, held in Mexico City from June 16 to 21.
In her LatinX keynote: “Clinical NLP: and other interest,” she highlighted the work she has carried out in Chile in the healthcare field, including public hospital waiting lists, oncology texts, and occupational health texts. In these projects, the teams use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to classify data provided by primary healthcare providers, with careful consideration for patient privacy and security. She also spoke about the collaborative work she is doing analyzing documents related to Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship.
The researcher traveled to Mexico City together with her students, Claudio Aracena (Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, U. Chile), Fabian Villena (DCC U. Chile and IMFD), and Luis Miranda (DCC UC), all authors of “A Privacy-Preserving Corpus for Occupational Health in Spanish: Evaluation for NER and Classification Tasks”, which was selected for presentation at the NAACL Clinical Workshop. “In this work, our goal is to be able to share occupational health texts thanks to the collaboration between IMFD and ACHS, while preserving people’s privacy, which we achieved by masking any information that could identify who they are,” says Jocelyn Dunstan.
Birds of a feather
Together with Luciana Benotti and Guido Ivetta, both from the Faculty of Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics and Computation at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina; Jocelyn Dunstan organized a “Birds of a Feather” session on ethics and privacy. These are sessions that are proposed by the organizers and aim to bring together people with similar interests.
The academic also took part in the Mexican NLP School, which began two days before the NAACL conference, on the LatinX Career Choices panel, where discussions covered the skills valued in both industry and academia, and the importance of choosing projects one truly believes in. Jocelyn also recorded two episodes for the Data Science podcast, one with Víctor Mireles and Efraín Navarro, already published, and another with Pablo Rivas, which will be released in the coming weeks.
“This conference was very comprehensive and was especially important because it is the first time NAACL has been held south of the Rio Grande. In fact, several people asked me whether Chile could be a host country in the future. In general, conferences are a moment for colleagues to meet who are usually only in remote contact. But a conference as important as this one in Mexico (NAACL is ranked A on the Core ranking) also pushes us to think about how to improve the representation of Latin Americans in the decision-making of the Association for Computational Linguistics,” says the UC academic.
