André Bittar

André Bittar is a Researcher at King's College London's Department of Biostatistics & Health Informatics within the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. His work focuses on applying computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) to mental health research, particularly in analyzing electronic health records (EHR) for suicide risk prediction, self-harm identification, and understanding caregiver-child interactions through speech analysis.

Education: Holds a PhD in computational linguistics from Université Paris Diderot. His research spans both academic and industrial settings, with expertise in anaphora resolution, temporal information extraction, and sentiment analysis. Current projects include multimodal deep learning approaches for emotional content detection in caregiver speech and assessing child mental health outcomes.

Research Themes

• NLP applications in mental health surveillance (suicide/self-harm prediction)
• EHR mining for clinical insights using machine learning
• Temporal analysis of medical records for disease duration modeling
• Cultural aspects in forensic linguistics (e.g., Māori whānau dynamics)

Publications emphasize innovative NLP methods for mental health challenges like perinatal self-harm detection and online activity analysis in adolescents. His work bridges computational linguistics with clinical psychiatry to develop actionable tools for healthcare professionals.

Key Projects

• Developing suicide risk prediction models from EHR text
• Multimodal analysis of caregiver speech for child mental health assessment
• CRIS system utilization for longitudinal suicide research

Labs/Teams: Part of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience's interdisciplinary teams focusing on mental health informatics and computational psychiatry.