With its primary communicative function, language plays a key role in human interaction, information sharing, and in social, emotional, and interpersonal expression. Linguistic data are pervasive, natural, unobtrusive, and inexpensive to capture. This talk presents cases of recent and ongoing interdisciplinary research using language, often coupled with other modalities, for making sense of issues in health and wellness. Language provides a rich and interpretable window into human cognition that computational linguistics can harness for addressing clinical topics, such as: analyzing discourse on social media in the context of behavioral health, characterizing clinical decision making in spoken diagnostic narratives, and seeking insights into medical image semantics. The talk also touches upon a set of open, intriguing considerations for continued research in linguistic sensing.

Bio: Cissi Ovesdotter Alm (Ph.D., UIUC) is a faculty member at Rochester Institute of Technology. She teaches and mentors students in computational linguistics and language science and co-directs the Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing Lab. Her research interests include linguistic sensing and mining with text, speech, and multimodal data. Publications comprise Affect in Text and Speech (2009) and articles, papers, and chapters in journals, conference proceedings, or edited collections.