Language Processing for Mental Health Treatment

Supervisor: Professor Matthew Purver

Research group(s): Cognitive Science

Recent work within EECS and elsewhere has shown that natural language processing and machine learning can help us characterise mental health conditions by analysing patterns in the language people use, with progress in diagnosing conditions and symptoms and in predicting the outcomes of therapy. This initial success opens up a new field of research with several challenges. Can computational models help us understand mental health treatment, by providing empirical models of the processes within therapy and their association with outcomes? Can we improve clinical systems by helping provide earlier or more accurate diagnosis, particularly with dementia? This project will build on recent work in the Cognitive Science group in collaboration with researchers in QMUL's School of Medicine and the universities of Exeter and Warwick, to advance both computational linguistic techniques for analysing and understanding dialogue, and their link to clinical research.