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SUMMARY:Linguistic Measures for the Detection of Clinical Conditions - Ali
 ne Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul\, University of 
 Essex)
DTSTART:20181129T110000Z
DTEND:20181129T120000Z
UID:TALK115285@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Edoardo Maria Ponti
DESCRIPTION:*Abstract:* Tests like Semantic Verbal Fluency have been used 
 to characterise language in typical and in clinical conditions\, like Deme
 ntia. For instance\, given a sequence of semantically related words\, a la
 rge number of switches from one semantic class to another has been linked 
 to clinical conditions. In this talk I discuss work on using semantic simi
 larity measures for characterising groups of speakers and how some measure
 s can be used to inform the detection of clinical conditions. In one study
  this information is used for building classifiers to distinguish healthy 
 controls from clinical cases with early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease an
 d Mild Cognitive Deficits. The results obtained indicate that the classifi
 ers that use these similarity measures outperform those that use a gold st
 andard taxonomy.\n\n*Short Bio:* Aline Villavicencio is a Reader in Comput
 er Science affiliated to the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Braz
 il) and also affiliated to the University of Essex (UK). Her research inte
 rests include lexical semantics\, multilinguality\, and cognitively motiva
 ted NLP. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 200
 1\, and held postdoc positions at the University of Cambridge and Universi
 ty of Essex (UK). During 2011-2012 and 2014-2015\, she was on sabbatical a
 t the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). She is a current member
  of the editorial board of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering\, t
 he Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics\, among o
 thers\, and was Area Chair for NAACL 2018\, for COLING 2018 and for IBERAM
 IA 2018\, and the Chair for the International Conference on Computational 
 Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2018). She is also a regular member of th
 e program committee for the various ACL conferences\, and has co-chaired n
 umerous *ACL workshops on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acqu
 isition and on Multiword Expressions. She has co-edited special issues and
  books dedicated to these topics.
LOCATION:Boardroom\, Faculty of English\, West Road
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