Research overview

My research is in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, with an emphasis on applications in health.

Working in the domain of health naturally motivates the methodological problems that I have worked on. For example, these include: model interpretability; learning with limited supervision from diverse sources; human-in-the-loop/hybrid systems; and trustworthiness of model outputs. For more details, see recent publications here.

On the applications side, one thread of my research concerns developing language technologies to automate (or semi-automate) biomedical evidence synthesis. Here is an episode of the NLP highlights podcast in which I discuss this work, here is a (brief) talk I gave at SciNLP 2020, and here is an article written for a lay audience about the effort. Elsewhere, I have worked on models for processing notes in Electronic Health Records.

A random sample of recentish publications

Somin Wadhwa, Vivek Khetan, Silvio Amir and Byron C. Wallace. RedHOT: A Corpus of Annotated Medical Questions, Experiences, and Claims on Social Media EACL (Findings); 2023.

Jay DeYoung, Stephanie C. Martinez, Iain J. Marshall and Byron C. Wallace. Do multi-document summarization models synthesize? Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL); 2024.

Somin Wadhwa, Jay DeYoung, Benjamin Nye, Silvio Amir, and Byron C. Wallace. Jointly Extracting Interventions, Outcomes, and Findings from RCT Reports with LLMs Machine Learning for Healthcare (MLHC); 2023.

News

01/16/2024 ICLR Spotlight

Our paper, Evaluating the Zero-shot Robustness of Instruction-tuned Language Models was accepted as Spotlight (top 5%) at ICLR 2024

10/01/2022 Helping radiologists navigate EHR

We have received a new R01 from the NIH/NLM to work on neural summarization methods to aid diagnosis (collaboration with Dr. Geoffrey Young at Brigham and Women's Hospital).

06/27/2022 NSF Medium

The NSF has awarded me and Zack Lipton a grant to work on summarization methods for consequential domains (like healthcare).

05/13/2022 ACL Outstanding Paper Award

Our paper, “Evaluating Factuality in Text Simplification", was selected as an Outstanding Paper at ACL 2022

Support

My work has been supported with grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation (including a CAREER grant), the Army Research Office, Seton hospital, Amazon and seed funds from Brown University.