Dr. Uzuner is an Associate Professor at George Mason University and a research affiliate at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), working with the Clinical Decision Making Group led by Professor Peter Szolovits and InfoLab led by Dr. Boris Katz.

Dr. Uzuner received her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in February 2005. Her research focuses on natural language processing, computational linguistics, and information retrieval, particularly in the medical domain. She also applies her techniques to real life policy questions such as fraud detection and understanding the concerns voiced in e-petitions.

Selected Refereed Journal Articles

  1. Hagen, L., Harrison, T. M., Uzuner, Ö., May, W., Fake, T., & Katragadda, S. (2016) “E-Petition popularity: Do linguistic and semantic factors matter?” The Government Information Quarterly special issue on Digital Government and Wicked Problems. Forthcoming.
  2. Goel S., Uzuner, O. (2016) “Do sentiments matter in fraud detection: Estimating semantic orientation of annual reports.” Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management. doi: 10.1002/isaf.1392. Version of Record online: 24 May 2016.
  3. Luo Y., Uzuner O., Szolovits P. (2016) “Bridging semantics and syntax with graph algorithms - State-of-the-Art of extracting biomedical relations.” Briefings in Bioinformatics. 2016 Feb 5. pii: bbw001.
  4. Stubbs A., Kotfila C., Xu H., Uzuner Ö. (2015) “Identifying risk factors for heart disease over time: Overview of 2014 i2b2/UTHealth shared task Track 2.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2015 Dec;58 Suppl:S67-77. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.07.001. Epub 2015 Jul 22.
  5. Kumar V., Stubbs A., Shaw S., Uzuner Ö. (2015) “Creation of a new longitudinal corpus of clinical narratives.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2015 Dec;58 Suppl:S6-S10. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.09.018. Epub 2015 Oct 1.
  6. Stubbs A., Uzuner Ö. (2015) “Annotating longitudinal clinical narratives for de-identification: the 2014 i2b2/UTHealth Corpus.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2015 Dec;58 Suppl:S20-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.07.020. Epub 2015 Aug 28.
  7. Kotfila C., Uzuner Ö. (2015) “A Systematic Comparison of Feature Space Effects on Disease Classifier Performance for Phenotype Identification of Five Diseases.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2015 Dec;58 Suppl:S92-S102. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.07.016. Epub 2015 Aug 1.
  8. Stubbs A., Kotfila C., Uzuner Ö. (2015) “Automated systems for the de-identification of longitudinal clinical narratives: Overview of 2014 i2b2/UTHealth shared task Track 1.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2015 Dec;58 Suppl:S11-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.06.007. Epub 2015 Jul 28.
  9. Zheng K., Vydiswaran V.G.V., Liu Y., Wang Y., Stubbs A., Uzuner O., Gururaj A.E., Bayer S., Aberdeen J., Rumshisky A., Pakhomov S., Liu H., Xu H. (2015) “Ease of adoption of clinical natural language processing software: An evaluation of five systems.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2015 Dec;58 Suppl:S189-96. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.07.008. Epub 2015 Jul 22.
  10. Stubbs A., Uzuner Ö. (2015) “Annotating Risk Factors for Heart Disease in Clinical Narratives for Diabetic Patients.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2015 Dec;58 Suppl:S78-91. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.05.009. Epub 2015 May 21.
  11. Luo Y., Xin Y., Hochberg E., Joshi R., Uzuner O., Szolovits P. (2015). “Subgraph Augmented Non-Negative Tensor Factorization (SANTF) for Modeling Clinical Narrative Text.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2015 Sep;22(5):1009-19. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocv016. Epub 2015 Apr 9.
  12. Sun W., Rumshisky A., Uzuner Ö. (2015). “Normalization of Relative and Incomplete Temporal Expressions in Clinical Narratives.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2015 Sep;22(5):1001-8. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocu004. Epub 2015 Apr 12.
  13. Chasin R., Rumshisky A., Uzuner Ö., Szolovits P. (2014). “Word Sense Disambiguation in the Clinical Domain: a Comparison of Knowledge-rich and Knowledge-poor Unsupervised Methods.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2014 Sep-Oct;21(5):842-9. Published Online First: 17 January 2014 doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2013-002133.
  14. Sun W., Rumshisky A., Uzuner Ö. (2013). "Annotating Temporal Information in Clinical Narratives." Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2013Dec; 46 Suppl:S5-12.
  15. Sun W., Rumshisky A., Uzuner Ö. (2013). "Temporal Reasoning on Clinical Text: The State of the Art." Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2013; 20:814-819.
  16. Sun W., Rumshisky A., Uzuner Ö. (2013). "Evaluating Temporal Information in Clinical Text: 2012 i2b2 Challenge Overview." Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2013; 20:806-813.
  17. Bodnari A., Szolovits P., Uzuner Ö. (2012). “MCORES: A System for Noun Phrase Coreference Resolution for Clinical Records.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000591.
  18. Uzuner Ö., Bodnari A., Shen S., Forbush T., Pestian J., South B. (2012). “Evaluating the State of the Art in Coreference Resolution for Electronic Medical Records.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000784.
  19. Pestian J.P., Matykiewicz P., Linn-Gust M., South B., Uzuner Ö., Wiebe J., Cohen K., Hurdle J., Brew C. (2012). “Sentiment Analysis of Suicide Notes: A Shared Task.” Biomedical Informatics Insights. 2012;5 (Suppl. 1):1–14.
  20. Uzuner Ö., South B., Shen S., DuVall S. (2011). “2010 i2b2/VA Challenge on Concepts, Assertions, and Relations in Clinical Text.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2011;18:552-556 Published Online First: 16 June 2011 doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000203.
  21. Halgrim S.R., Xia F., Solti I., Cadag E., Uzuner Ö. (2011). “A Cascade of Classifiers for Extracting Medication Information from Discharge Summaries.” Journal of Biomedical Semantics. 2011;2(Suppl 3):S2 (14 July 2011).
  22. Goel S., Gangolly J., Faerman S., Uzuner Ö. (2010). “Can Linguistic Predictors Detect Fraudulent Financial Filings?” Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting. 2010;7(1):25 doi:10.2308/jeta.2010.7.1.25.
  23. Uzuner Ö., Mailoa J., Ryan R.J., Sibanda T. (2010). “Semantic Relations for Problem-Oriented Medical Records.” International Journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. 2010;50:63-73 doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2010.05.006.
  24. Uzuner Ö., Solti I., Xia F., Cadag E. (2010). “Community Annotation Experiment for Ground Truth Generation for the i2b2 Medication Challenge.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2010;17:519-523 doi:10.1136/jamia.2010.004200
  25. Uzuner Ö., Solti I., Cadag E. (2010). “Extracting Medication Information from Clinical Text.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2010;17:514-518 doi:10.1136/jamia.2010.003947.

Selected Invited Papers and editorials

  1. Uzuner Ö., Stubbs A. (2015). Guest Editorial: “Practical applications for Natural Language Processing in Clinical Research: the 2014 i2b2/UTHealth shared tasks.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Volume 58, Supplement, December 2015, Pages S1–S5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2015.10.007.
  2. Uzuner Ö., Stubbs A., Sun W. (2013). Guest Editorial: “Chronology of your health events: Approaches to extracting temporal relations from medical narratives.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics 46 (2013) S1–S4.
  3. Chapman W.W., Nadkarni P. M., Hirschman L., D’Avolio L., Savova G., Uzuner Ö. (2011). “Overcoming Barriers to NLP for Clinical Text: The Role of Shared Tasks and the Need for Additional Creative Solutions.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2011;18:540-543 doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000465.

Selected Book chapters

  1. Stubbs A., Uzuner Ö. (2015). Chapter: “De-identification of Medical Records Through Annotation” in Handbook of Linguistic Annotation. Ed. Ide, Nancy and Pustejovsky, James. 2014. Berlin: Springer. Forthcoming.
  2. Stubbs A., Uzuner Ö., Kotfila C., Goldstein I., Szolovits P. (2015). Chapter: “Challenges in Synthesizing Surrogate PHI in Narrative EMRs” in Medical Data Privacy Handbook. Ed. Gkoulalas-Divanis, Aris and Loukides, Grigorios. 2015. Berlin: Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-23633-9.

Selected Refereed Conference Proceedings Articles

  1. Hagen L., Harrison T. M., Uzuner Ö., Fake T., LaManna D., Kotfila C. (2015). “Introducing Semantic Tools for Policy Analysis: A Case Study of E-petitions.” Proceedings of the 16th International Digital Government Research Conference (dg.o 2015), Phoenix, Arizona, May 27-30, 2015.
  2. Hagen L., Uzuner Ö., Kotfila C., Harrison T, LaManna D. (2015). “Understanding Citizens’ Direct Policy Suggestions to the Federal Government: A Natural Language Processing and Topic Modeling Approach.” Proceedings of the 48th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-48), Kauai, HI, January 5-8, 2015. IEEE Computer Society.
  3. Luo Y., Uzuner Ö. (2014). “Semi-Supervised Learning to Identify UMLS Semantic Relations.” Proceedings of the AMIA 2014 Joint Summits on Translational Science, San Francisco, CA, April 7-11, 2014.
  4. Bodnari A., Névéol A., Uzuner Ö. Zweigenbaum P., Szolovits P. “Multilingual Named-Entity Recognition from Parallel Corpora.” Proceedings of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF-2013), Valencia, Spain, 23-26 September, 2013.
  5. Huang K.-Y., Chengalur-Smith I., Uzuner Ö., Nambisan P., Choi N. (2012). “Supporters in Deed: Studying Online Support Provision from the Perspective of Social Capital.” Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS’12), Orlando, FL, December 16-19, 2012.
  6. Huang K.-Y., Chengalur-Smith I., Uzuner Ö., Nambisan P., Choi N. (2012). “Supporters in Deed: Studying Online Support Provision from the Perspective of Social Capital.” Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Workshop on Health IT and Economics (White’12), Washington, DC, October 5-6, 2012.
  7. South B.R., Shen S., Barrus R., DuVall S.L., Uzuner Ö., Weir C. (2011). “Qualitative Analysis of Workflow Modifications Used to Generate the Reference Standard for the 2010 i2b2/VA Challenge.” Proceedings of the Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA 2011), Washington, DC, October 22-26, 2011.
  8. Huang K.-Y., Nambisan P., Uzuner Ö. (2010). “Informational Support or Emotional Support: Preliminary Study of an Automated Approach to Analyze Online Support Community Contents.” Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS'10), St. Louis, MO, December 12-15, 2010.
  9. Goldstein I., Uzuner Ö. (2010). “Does Negation Really Matter?” In: Morante R., Sporleder C., Eds. Proceedings of the Workshop on Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing, Uppsala, Sweden 2010;23-7.
  10. Halgrim S., Xia F., Solti I., Cadag E., Uzuner Ö. (2010). “Extracting Medication Information from Discharge Summaries.” Proceedings of the NAACL-HLT 2010 2nd Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documents, Los Angeles, CA, June 5-6, 2010.
  11. Halgrim S.R., Xia F., Solti I., Cadag E., Uzuner Ö. (2010). “Statistical Extraction of Medication Information from Clinical Records.” Proceedings of the 2010 AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics, San Francisco, CA, March 10-12, 2010.

Selected Teaching Experience

State University of New York, Albany, NY

Department of Information Studies

Editorial Board

  1. Artificial Intelligence Research. Spring 2012-Present.
  2. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Spring 2014-Present.
  3. Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Fall 2011-Spring 2014.

Guest Editor

  1. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Special issue on i2b2 2014 Challenges. Spring 2014-Present. Co-guest editor: Amber Stubbs.
  2. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Special issue on i2b2 Temporal Relations Challenges. Spring 2013-Spring 2014. Co-guest editor: Amber Stubbs.

Recent Shared-Task and Workshop Organization

  1. Co-Chair and Organizer. CEGS N-GRID Shared-Tasks and Workshop on Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data. De-identification and Research Domains Criteria for Psychiatry. In conjunction with the Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA 2016), Chicago, IL, November 11, 2016.
  2. Organizer. Natural Language Processing Working Group Pre-Symposium: Graduate Student Consortium and ‘Hackathon’. In conjunction with the Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA 2016), Chicago, IL, November 12, 2016.
  3. Organizer. Natural Language Processing Working Group Pre-Symposium – a Doctoral Consortium and a Workshop on Tools and resources demonstration and 'Connectathon'! In conjunction with the Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA 2015), San Francisco, CA, November 14, 2015.
  4. Organizer. Natural Language Processing Working Group Pre-Symposium – a Doctoral Consortium and a Workshop on Interoperability of Clinical NLP Systems. In conjunction with the Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA 2014), Washington, DC, November 15, 2014.
  5. Co-Chair and Organizer. 7th i2b2/UTHealth Shared-Task and Workshop on Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data. De-identification and Identifying Risk Factors for Heart Disease over Time. In conjunction with the Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association, Washington, DC, November 14, 2014.
  6. Co-Chair and Organizer. 6th i2b2 Shared-Task and Workshop on Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data. Temporal Relations. In conjunction with the Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association, Chicago, IL, November 1, 2012.
  7. Co-Chair and Organizer. 5th i2b2/VA Shared-Task and Workshop on Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data. Co-reference resolution. In conjunction with the Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association, Washington, DC, October 21-22, 2011.
  8. Session Chair.  Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association, Washington, DC, October 21-22, 2011.
  9. Organizing Committee. ICML 2011 Workshop on Learning from Unstructured Text, Bellevue, WA, June 28-July 2, 2011.
  10. Co-Chair and Organizer. 4th i2b2/VA Shared-Task and Workshop on Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data.  Concepts, Assertions, and Relations.  In conjunction with the Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association, Washington, DC, November 12-13, 2010.

Contact Info

Research Affiliate

  • Address

    MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
    Clinical Decision Making Group

  • Email

    uzuner AT mit.edu