Noémie Elhadad Assistant Professor Department of Biomedical Informatics Columbia University 622 W. 168th Street, VC-5 New York, NY 10032 noemie @ dbmi.columbia.edu

My research interests are in natural language processing, with particular focus on text summarization and discourse-level structuring of information. I investigate ways in which clinical texts (these include scientific articles, medical textbooks, and patient notes) and health consumer texts (health news stories, educational health documents, and peer-patient forum posts) can be processed automatically to enhance access to relevant information for physicians, health researchers, and health consumers alike.

Until Fall 2005, I was a Computer Science doctoral student at Columbia University in the Natural Language Processing group headed by Prof. Kathleen McKeown. In 2006, I was an assistant professor in the Computer Science department of The City College of New York. I moved to DBMI in Fall 2007.

Teaching and Advising
 
Computational Methods in Biomedical Informatics (Spring)
Research Projects available to DBMI, P&S and CS students
Students as of Spring 2009:

• [Postdoc] Sam Brody
• [Ph.D.] Tielman Van Vleck, Karthik Natarajan
• [M.A.] Sharon Gorman-Lipsky
• [M.Ph.] Meghan Burke
• [M.Sc.] (Computer Science dept.) Mukund Jha, Or Biran
• [Undergrad] (Computer Science dept.) Anthony Yim

 
Data and Code
 
MERKI, an open-source medication parser for clinical notes.
Restaurant review corpus, annotated with topic and sentiment labels at the sentence level.
Sentence ordering for text summarization.
Sentence alignment for monolingual comparable corpora.

 
Funded Research Projects

• HARVEST - An intelligent summarization system for the electronic health record. This project is funded by the National Library of Medicine (#1R01LM010027).
• LITE - Librarian Infobutton Tailoring Environment. This project is funded by the National Library of Medicine (#G08LM009376).
• Characterizing Autism Spectrum Disorders phenotype by multimedia signal processing and NLP - This project is funded by the Simons Foundation and is a collaboration with Partha Mitra (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory).
• URSA - Understanding User Reviewing Patterns. This project is funded by a Google Research Award.

 
Publications  
Research cloud created by Wordle with my paper abstracts.

• Samuel Brody and Noémie Elhadad.
  An Unsupervised Aspect-Sentiment Model for Online Reviews.
  2010. NAACL. to appear.
   
• Karthik Natarajan, Daniel Stein, Samat Jain, and Noémie Elhadad.
  An Analysis of Clinical Queries in an Electronic Health Record Search Utility.
  2010. International Journal of Medical Informatics (IJMI). to appear.
   
• Karthik Natarajan, Daniel Stein, Samat Jain, and Noémie Elhadad.
  CISearch: What do Clinicians Search for within the EHR?
  2009. AMIA Annual Symposium to appear. San Francisco, CA. Best Student Paper Finalist.
   
• Lijun Feng, Noémie Elhadad, and Matt Huenerfauth.
  Cognitively Motivated Features for Readability Assessment.
  2009. EACL, pp. 229-237. Athens, Greece. [pdf]
   
• Matt Huenerfauth, Lijun Feng, and Noémie Elhadad.
  Comparing Evaluation Techniques for Text Readability Software for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities.
  2009. ASSETS, pp. 3-10. Pittsburgh, PA. [pdf]
   
• Gayatree Ganu, Noémie Elhadad, and Amélie Marian.
  Beyond the Stars: Improving Rating Predictions using Review Text Content.
  2009. WebDB. Providence, RI. [pdf]
   
• George Hripcsak, Noémie Elhadad, Cynthia Chen, Li Zhou, Frances P. Morrison.
  Using Empirical Semantic Correlation to Deduce Meaning in Temporal Assertions in Clinical Texts.
  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), 2009, 16:220-227. in press
   
• Sigfried Gold, Noémie Elhadad, Xinxin Zhu, James Cimino, and George Hripcsak.
  Extracting Structured Medication Event Information from Discharge Summaries.
  2008. AMIA Annual Symposium, pp. 237-241. Washigton, DC. Distinguished Paper Award. [pdf]
   
• Patrick McCormick, Noémie Elhadad, and Peter Stetson.
  Use of Semantic Features to Classify Patient Smoking Status.
  2008. AMIA Annual Symposium, pp. 450-454. Washington, DC. Best Student Paper Finalist. [pdf]
   
• Tielman Van Vleck, Adam Wilcox, Peter Stetson, Stephen Johnson, and Noémie Elhadad.
  Content and Structure of Clinical Problem Lists: A Corpus Analysis.
  2008. AMIA Annual Symposium, pp. 753-757. Washington, DC. [pdf]
   
• Xiaoyan Wang, Amy Chused, Noémie Elhadad, Carol Friedman, and Marianthi Markatou.
  Automated Knowledge Acquisition from Clinical Narrative Reports.
  2008. AMIA Annual Symposium, pp. 783-787. Washington, DC. [pdf]
   
• Noémie Elhadad and Komal Sutaria.
  Mining a Lexicon of Technical Terms and Lay Equivalents.
  2007. ACL BioNLP Workshop, pp. 49-56. Prague, Czech Republic. [pdf]
   
• Noémie Elhadad.
  Comprehending Technical Texts: Predicting and Defining Unfamiliar Terms.
  2006. AMIA Annual Symposium, pp. 239-243. Washington, DC. [pdf]
   
• Noémie Elhadad.
  User-Sensitive Text Summarization: Application to the Medical Domain.
  Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, January 2006. [pdf]
   
• Noémie Elhadad, Kathleen McKeown, David Kaufman, and Desmond Jordan.
  Facilitating Physicians' Access to Information via Tailored Text Summarization.
  2005. AMIA Annual Symposium, pp. 226-230. Washington, DC. [pdf]
   
• Noémie Elhadad, Min-Yen Kan, Judith Klavans, and Kathleen McKeown.
  Customization in a Unified Framework for Summarizing Medical Literature.
  Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 2005, 33(2):179-198. in press
   
• Noémie Elhadad.
  User-Sensitive Text Summarization.
  2004. AAAI Doctoral Consortium, pp. 987-988. San Jose, CA. [pdf]
   
• Regina Barzilay and Noémie Elhadad.
  Sentence Alignment for Monolingual Comparable Corpora.
  2003. EMNLP, pp. 25-32. Sapporo, Japan. [pdf]
   
• Kathleen McKeown, Noémie Elhadad and Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou.
  Leveraging a Common Representation for Personalized Search and Summarization in a Medical Digital Library,
  2003. JCDL, pp. 159-170. Houston, TX. [pdf]
   
• Regina Barzilay, Noémie Elhadad and Kathleen McKeown.
  Inferring Strategies for Sentence Ordering in Multidocument News Summarization.
  Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2002, 17:35-55. [pdf]
   
• Simone Teufel and Noémie Elhadad.
  Collection and Linguistic Processing of a Large-scale Corpus of Medical Articles.
  2002. LREC, pp. 1214-1218. Canary Islands, Spain. [pdf]
   
• Noémie Elhadad and Kathleen McKeown.
  Towards Generating Patient Specific Summaries of Medical Articles.
  2001. NAACL Workshop on Automatic Summarization, pp. 31-39. Pittsburgh, PA. [pdf]
   
• Regina Barzilay, Noémie Elhadad and Kathleen McKeown.
  Sentence Ordering in Multidocument Summarization,
  2001. HLT, pp. 318-324. San Diego, CA. [pdf]