Saving Lives With Natural Language Processing at HLTCon

You've probably heard plenty about companies using text analytics to track of their brand on social media, or pull insights from product reviews, but the same software can predict far more serious occurrences than a dissatisfied customer. We've invited Karthik Dinakar, PhD candidate and Reid Hoffman Fellow at MIT, to speak at our Human Language Technology Conference (HLTCon) March 31st to discuss how text analytics can save lives. Karthik will present his research that applies text understanding to five areas--online cyberbullying; online adolescent distress; crisis counseling on text hotlines; ways to model, predict and treat self-harm; and "cardiolinguistics" to model atypical angina in coronary heart disease. For example, natural language processing technology can "read" texts written in social media or on chat helplines and find signals that alert doctors or counselors to a person who is threatened by cyberbullying or in imminent danger of directed self-harm. Similarly, heart attacks in women are often undiagnosed because their description of symptoms may not "present" as a heart attack.