Natalie Parde

Natalie Parde is a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) with a strong focus on healthcare applications. Her research integrates computational linguistics, clinical psychology, and machine learning to address challenges in mental health, empathy modeling, dementia detection, and pediatric rehabilitation. She leads the UIC NLP research group, mentoring students and collaborating with clinicians to develop datasets like CareCorpus and AcnEmpathize, which support real-world healthcare solutions.

Her work emphasizes empathy detection in online health communities, leveraging figurative language (metaphors, idioms) to improve conversational AI. She also pioneers methods for early Alzheimer's detection using spoken language biomarkers and domain adaptation techniques. In pediatric care, she designs NLP tools to classify caregiver strategies, enabling personalized rehabilitation plans. Research trends show consistent innovation in transformer-based models, data augmentation, and cross-domain generalization for clinical NLP tasks.

While no awards are mentioned, she contributes to reproducibility initiatives (e.g., ReproHum) and educational resources, such as open-access NLP course slides. Her grants and lab details are unspecified, but collaborations span psychiatry (e.g., bipolar disorder, schizophrenia), rehabilitation science, and AI ethics.