Oct
20
Bob Lannon, Natural Language Wrangler
What do you do?
I work for a company called Verilogue, which collects and transcribes the in-office dialogues between physicians and patients. There’s a lot of discussion today about the healthcare system, but the goal of Verilogue’s research is to provide a more realistic idea of what the relationship between physicians and their patients is REALLY like.
Tech/data-wise, the challenge is this: We have over 65,000 recordings and transcripts, and it’s my job to make all of that unstructured data meaningful for our analysts, without them having to read through hundreds of conversations to get at some topic that they want to investigate. Towards that the team and I have designed various advanced searching tools, data visualization and semantically-aware indexes all with the goal of serving up quality results to our users searches.
What do you wish you did?
Everything, just like any other crazy creative person.
But actually, as a matter of fact, I’m going to get my chance to do one thing that I’m very interested in doing: contribute to anthropological and linguistics research. I’m in the planning stages of developing a research-oriented clone of Verilogue’s database, which will make it possible for this one collection of transcriptions and recordings to be annotated by research teams from fields as far flung as ethnography, healthcare outcomes research, formal syntax, discourse analysis, psychology, phonology, automatic speech recognition, and voice synthesis.
Have you ever been to a BarCamp before? If so, which one(s)?
Nope!
If you were to lead a session, what would it be about?
Text clustering algorithms in Python, statistical computing in R or maybe leveraging Lucene indexes with the semanticvectors package.
Give us one interesting fact about yourself!
I’m painted on the side of the Philadelphia International Airport, as part of the mural “How Philly Moves,” because, you know….I move.