Successful participation of IMFD researcher Jocelyn Dunstan in NAACL-HLT 2024
June, 2024. Languages are the heart and soul of cultural identity and communication, and nowhere is this more evident than in the vibrant scene of Latin America and the Caribbean: with this in mind, the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2024) kicked off. 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2024).
This conference brings together leading researchers from across the Americas in the area of Computational Linguistics (CLL), the interdisciplinary field that deals with the processing by machines (computers) of the language we humans speak. the interdisciplinary field that deals with the processing by machines (computers) of the language spoken by humans.
Researcher IMFD, Jocelyn Dustan Escudero, academic IMC - DCC UC and IMFD researcher, participated with her team in the activities of the in the activities of the conference, which took place in Mexico City from June 16 to 21.
In his keynote at LatinXClinical NLP: "Clinical NLP: and other interest", he highlighted the work he has done in Chile in the health area, with waiting lists in public hospitals, oncological and occupational health text. In these projects, the teams use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to classify the data delivered by primary health care providers, with considerations in the privacy and security of patients. He also talked about the collaborative work being done in the analysis of documents related to the 1973-1990 dictatorship in Chile.
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 "APrivacy-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, we aim to be able to share occupational health texts thanks to the collaboration between IMFD and ACHS, but preserving the privacy of the People, which we managed to do by masking any information that would allow us to identify who it is", emphasizes Jocelyn Dunstan.
Birds of a feathers
Together with Luciana Benotti y Guido Ivettaboth from the Faculty of Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics and Computer Science of the National University of Cordoba, Argentina; Jocelyn DunstanArgentina; Jocelyn Dunstan organized a "Birds of Feathers" session on ethics and privacy. "Birds of Feathers" session on ethics and privacy.. These are sessions that apply to the organization, and seek to bring together People with similar interests.
The academic also participated in the Mexican School of PLN, which started two days before the NAACL conference, in the LatinX Career Choices panel, where she talked about the competencies valued in both industry and academia, and the importance of selecting projects in which one really believes. Jocelyn also recorded two episodes for the Data Science podcast, one with Victor Mireles and Efrain Navarro already published, and another with Pablo Rivas to 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 under the Rio Grande. In fact, several People asked me if Chile could host it in the future. In general the conferences are a moment of encounter between colleagues with whom we are usually in contact only remotely. But such an important conference in Mexico (NAACL is A in the Core ranking), also pushes us to improve the representation of Latinas and Latinos in the decision making of the Association for Computational Linguistics, indicates the UC academic.
