Allie Lahnala

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NIH/NIDA

Baltimore, MD

I am a natural language processing (NLP) researcher focusing on computational social science and conversation dynamics in goal-oriented settings and interpersonal interactions involving particular social intents, such as persuasion and offering support. I work with various domains and contexts, such as online forums for supportive and opinionated interactions, and clinical conversations, in which I investigate stance dynamics and empathetic interactions, and transfer learning to better model social NLP tasks. I am also interested in developing theory-driven empathy research approaches for NLP that consider the complex affective and cognitive processes and social factors that influence empathetic expression and perception.

I completed my PhD studies at University of Bonn, Germany in the Conversational AI and Social Analytics (CAISA) lab with Prof. Lucie Flek and am now postdoctoral researcher at NIH/NIDA in Baltimore, MD.

news

Oct 4, 2024 Alok Debnath presents his talk “An Examination of “Empathy” in Conversational Interfaces for LLMs” at the EUtopia: Human-centred AI Beyond Words workshop.
Sep 9, 2024 Began as a postdoc at NIH/NIDA.
Sep 6, 2024 Completed my PhD thesis defense! Thesis title: Operationalizing Empathic and Supportive Communication in Natural Language Processing.
May 24, 2024 At LREC-COLING 2024 giving a talk on our work Appraisal Framework for Clinical Empathy: A Novel Application to Breaking Bad News Conversations and presenting a poster on LeadEmpathy: An Expert Annotated German Dataset of Empathy in Written Leadership Communication.
Mar 28, 2024 The preprints of our LREC-COLING papers are available on my website: (1) Appraisal Framework for Clinical Empathy: A Novel Application to Breaking Bad News Conversations and (2) LeadEmpathy: An Expert Annotated German Dataset of Empathy in Written Leadership Communication