CPERL Publication Alert: Expanding and Augmenting Data on Participation-Focused Strategies to be presented and published in Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

CPERL Publication Alert: Expanding and Augmenting Data on Participation-Focused Strategies to be presented and published in Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Coming soon to the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: the publication entitled, CareCorpus+: Expanding and Augmenting Caregiver Strategy Data to Support Pediatric Rehabilitation.

NLP (Natalie and Shahla) and CPERL (Mary, Vivian, Ivana, and Vera) members teamed up to publish and present their work about creating a large dataset of 3,062 caregiver strategies to support pediatric rehabilitation. This publication builds on previous work, in which CareCorpus was constrained by a limited availability of caregiver strategy data involving children, across a subset of relevant age ranges and rehabilitation care contexts. CareCorpus+ is a larger, more diverse data source that can help strengthen applicability across the broader pediatric rehabilitation care continuum. CareCorpus+ was then used to validate the finding that PEM caregiver strategy data can be automatically classified into pre-determined participation constructs using a multinomial classification approach, and to provide preliminary results on the value of data augmentation to strengthen model performance. The latter finding merits study into potential new and ethically sound directions for synthetically generating caregiver strategy data for similar applications.

We are reminded that research is rarely advanced through one person alone, and want to honor the many dedicated team members who have earned credit for their contributions to this body of work. This includes CPERL lab alumna, Ivana Lucero, who contributed greatly during her time as an undergraduate research assistant and through her honors capstone project, which focused on manually classifying caregiver strategies to facilitate young children's participation outcomes to help build the CareCorpus+ dataset that was used in this study. Ivana is doing wonderful things now, currently working as a caregiver for an adult with a disability and even learning American Sign Language (ASL) through the Oklahoma School for the Deaf! ASL is now an important part of her life as she learned how helpful it can be for children and people with disabilities, which are two primary populations she has engaged with to date. With her new ASL skills, she hopes to be able to apply to speech language pathology programs in the near future.

Ivana shares: I am so incredibly grateful to have begun my research career through CPERL and my Honors capstone. The NSF Aim 2b Project was a significant stepping stone in my undergraduate experience for I was able to help propel research that had been built by my CPERL mentors (Mary, Vera) and Vivian. My time at CPERL was especially rewarding and I have grown so much from all who have helped me throughout my capstone journey from CPERL and the NLP lab. I am confident the lessons they have taught me will follow me in my future endeavors and I am excited to see the results of our hard work through this recent publication!