My research interest is developing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Langauge Understanding techniques and methodologies (NLU) to advance healthcare. I've been working on related topics for over 6 years.
My doctoral dissertation is "Neural-Symbolic Approaches for Translating Medical Evidence from Free-text Literature to Evidence-Based Practice", in which, the overall goal is to develop novel NLP and NLU methdologies to
help clinicians retrieve and understand relevant medical evidence more efficiently for practicing Evidence-based Medicine at the point of care;
enable efficient access to unstrutured medical evidence for reseach.
Specific Aims
AIM I Develop a multi-level conceptual model, EvidenceMap, which is tailored to different information needs in Evidence-based Medicine. AIM II Develop an information extraction system to extract evidence from the clinical research literature. AIM III Develop an EvidenceMap-indexed medical evidence base that can better attend to different needs in evidence searching. AIM IV Develop a neuro-symbolic approach to comprehend clinical research literature for evidence synthesis.
Publication highlights
Kang, T., Perotte, A., Tang, Y., Ta, C., & Weng, C. (2021). UMLS-based data augmentation for natural language processing of clinical research literature. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 28(4), 812-823. Kang, T., Zou, S., & Weng, C. (2019). Pretraining to recognize PICO elements from randomized controlled trial literature. Studies in health technology and informatics, 264, 188. Wei, D. H., Kang, T., Pincus, H. A., & Weng, C. (2019). Construction of disease similarity networks using concept embedding and ontology. Studies in health technology and informatics, 264, 442. Rogers, J. R., Callahan, T. J., Kang, T., Bauck, A., Khare, R., Brown, J. S., ... & Weng, C. (2019). A Data Element-Function Conceptual Model for Data Quality Checks. eGEMs, 7(1). Yuan, C., Ryan, P. B., Ta, C., Guo, Y., Li, Z., Hardin, J., ... Kang, T. & Weng, C. (2019). Criteria2Query: a natural language interface to clinical databases for cohort definition. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 26(4),294-305. Zhang, S., Kang, T., Qiu, L., Zhang, W., Yu, Y., & Elhadad, N. (2017, April). Cataloguing treatments discussed and used in online autism communities. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 123-131). Kang, T., Zhang, S., Tang, Y., Hruby, G. W., Rusanov, A., Elhadad, N., & Weng, C. (2017). EliIE: An open-source information extraction system for clinical trial eligibility criteria. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 24(6), 1062-1071. Kang, T., Zhang, S., Xu, N., Wen, D., Zhang, X., & Lei, J. (2017). Detecting negation and scope in Chinese clinical notes using character and word embedding. Computer methods and programs in biomedicine, 140, 53-59. Zhang, S., Kang, T., Zhang, X., Wen, D., Elhadad, N., & Lei, J. (2016). Speculation detection for Chinese clinical notes: impacts of word segmentation and embedding models. Journal of biomedical informatics, 60, 334-341.