Natalie Parde

Natalie Parde is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). She co-directs the UIC Natural Language Processing Laboratory and holds affiliations with the AI.Health4All Center for Health Equity using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence as well as the UIC Honors College. Her research focuses on natural language processing with applications in healthcare, multimodal communication, and creative language analysis.

• Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas
• M.S., Computer Science, University of North Texas
• B.S., Computer Science, University of North Texas

Parde's research spans three primary strands: NLP interfaces for educational technology, health-oriented summarization, and multimodal communication systems. Recent publications highlight advancements in dementia detection through spoken language analysis, empathy prediction in conversational systems, and multimodal emotion classification. Her work frequently addresses healthcare applications of NLP, including mental health assessment and medical self-disclosure detection.

Scientific awards include the Dr. Hermann Zemlicka Award for Most Visionary Paper at Gmunden Retreat on NeuroIS 2024. She has advised numerous doctoral students, including Gyeongeun Lee working on empathy detection via figurative language, Shahla Farzana researching dementia detection methods, and Mohammad Arvan investigating reproducibility in NLP evaluations. The UIC NLP Lab under her direction focuses on developing NLP systems that positively impact society through educational technology interfaces and healthcare applications.