NLP Applications
We employ NLP methods across diverse domains, encompassing finance, education, biomedicine, healthcare, and social media.
NLP for Health
Our work in biomedical and clinical NLP includes
pharmacovigilance event extraction from medical
case reports, radiology report generation from
x-ray images, biomedical QA, explainable drug-drug
interaction extraction, health-related rumour
veracity assessment, topical phrase extraction from
clinical reports, and understanding patient
reviews.
Participants
Zhaoyue Sun, Jun Wang, Junru Lu, Jiazheng Li, Gabriele Pergola, Lin Gui
Project
- Event-Centric Framework for Natural Language Understanding (Jan 2021-Dec 2025), Turing AI Fellowship, funded by the UKRI.
Publications (since 2021)
- Z. Sun, J. Li, G. Pergola, B.C. Wallace, and Y. He. Leveraging ChatGPT in Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction: An Empirical Study , The 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2024.
- J. Wang, A. Bhalerao, T. Yin, S. See, Y. He. CAMANet: Class Activation Map Guided Attention Network for Radiology Report Generation, arXiv:2211.01412.
- J. Wang, A. Bhalerao, L. Zhu, and Y. He. Can Prompt Learning Benefit Radiology Report Generation? , arXiv:2308.16269.
- J. Lu, J. Li, B.C. Wallace, Y. He and G. Pergola. NapSS: Paragraph-level Medical Text Simplification via Narrative Prompting and Sentence-matching Summarization, Findings of EACL, May. 2023.
- Z. Sun, J. Li, G. Pergola, B.C. Wallace, B. John, N. Greene, J. Kim and Y. He. PHEE: A Dataset for Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction from Text, The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Dec. 2022.
- J. Wang, A. Bhalerao and Y. He. Cross-modal Prototype Driven Network for Radiology Report Generation, 17th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Oct. 2022.
- L. Gui and Y. He. Understanding Patient Reviews with Minimum Supervision, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine , to appear.
- G. Pergola, E. Kochkina, L. Gui, M. Liakata and Y. He. Boosting Low-Resource Biomedical QA via Entity-Aware Masking Strategies, The 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Apr. 2021.
NLP for Finance
Work in NLP for Finance includes financial event
extraction from financial statements, opinion
mining of customer reviews, ESG report analysis,
and causal inference from earnings call
transcripts.
Project
- Event-Centric Framework for Natural Language Understanding (Jan 2021-Dec 2025), Turing AI Fellowship, funded by the UKRI.
Participants
Xinyu Wang, Yuxiang Zhou, Runcong Zhao, Lin Gui
Publications (since 2021)
- X. Wang, L. Gui and Y. He. A Scalable Framework for Table of Contents Extraction from Complex ESG Annual Reports , The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
- Y. Zhou and Y. He. Causal Inference from Text: Unveiling Interactions between Variables, Findings of EMNLP, 2023.
- X. Wang, L. Gui and Y. He. Document-Level Multi-Event Extraction with Event Proxy Nodes and Hausdorff Distance Minimization, The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Jul. 2023.
- R. Zhao, L. Gui and Y. He. CONE: Unsupervised Contrastive Opinion Extraction, The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Jul. 2023.
- R. Zhao, L. Gui, H. Yan and Y. He. Tracking Brand-Associated Polarity-Bearing Topics in User Reviews, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, accepted.
NLP for Education
We collaborate with AQA to develop explainable student answer scoring systems for GCSE Science.
Projects
- Automated Scoring System for GCSE Science Exams, (2022-2026), funded by AQA.
- Elandi: trustworthy generative AI for affordable personalised learning and development (2024-2025), funded by Innovate UK under the Accelerating Trustworthy AI: Phase 2 Collaborative R&D call, led by AI for Global Goals.
Participants
Jiazheng Li, Yuxiang Zhou, Lin Gui
Publications (since 2021)
- J. Li, L. Gui, Y. Zhou, D. West, C. Aloisi and Y. He. Distilling ChatGPT for Explainable Automated Student Answer Assessment, arXiv:2305.12962.
NLP for Social Media
In social media analysis, we carry out research in
understanding microblog conversations, Twitter
sentiment analysis, cyberbullying detection, event
extraction and visualisation on Twitter, and
analysis of persuasive argumentation in political
debates.
Participants
Miguel Arana-Catania, Lin Gui, John Dougrez-Lewis, Wenjia Zhang, Lixing Zhu
Publications (since 2021)
- L. Zhu, R. Zhao, G. Pergola and Y. He. Disentangling Aspect and Stance via a Siamese Autoencoder for Aspect Clustering of Vaccination Opinions, Findings of ACL, Jul. 2023.
- R. Zhao, L. Gui and Y. He. CONE: Unsupervised Contrastive Opinion Extraction, The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Jul. 2023.
- W. Zhang, L. Gui, R. Procter and Y. He. NewsQuote: A Dataset Built on Quote Extraction and Attribution for Expert Recommendation in Fact-Checking, The 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media: News Media and Computational Journalism Workshop, Jun. 2023.
- R. Zhao, M. Arana Catania, L. Zhu, E. Kochkina, L. Gui, A. Zubiaga, R. Procter, M. Liakata and Y. He. PANACEA: An Automated Misinformation Detection System on COVID-19, EACL system demonstration track, May. 2023.
- R. Zhao, L. Gui, H. Yan and Y. He. Tracking Brand-Associated Polarity-Bearing Topics in User Reviews, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, accepted.
- L. Zhu, Z. Fang, G. Pergola, R. Procter and Y. He. Disentangled Learning of Stance and Aspect Topics for Vaccine Attitude Detection in Social Media, 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Jul. 2022.
- J. Dougrez-Lewis, M. Arana Catania, E. Kochkina, M. Liakata and Y. He. PHEMEPlus: Enriching Social Media Rumour Verification with External Evidence, The 5th FEVER Workshop, co-located with ACL May 2022.
- S. Salawu, J. Lumsden, Y. He. A Mobile-Based System for Preventing Online Abuse and Cyberbullying, International Journal of Bullying Prevention (ACL), to appear.
- W. Zhang, L. Gui and Y. He. Supervised Contrastive Learning for Multi-modal Unreliable News Detection in COVID-19 Pandemic, The 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Nov. 2021.
- J. Dougrez-Lewis, E. Kochkina, M. Liakata and Y. He. Learning Disentangled Latent Topics for Twitter Rumour Veracity Classificationn, Findings of ACL, Aug. 2021.
- M. Arana-Catania, F. A. Van Lier, R. Procter, N. Tkachenko, Y. He, A. Zubiaga, M. Liakata. Citizen Participation and Machine Learning for a Better Democracy, Digital Government: Research and Practice, to appear.
- S. Salawu, J. Lumsden and Y. He. A Large-Scale English Multi-Label Twitter Dataset for Cyberbullying and Online Abuse Detection, Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms, co-located with ACL, Aug. 2021.