[Explainable AI Team Seminar] NLP for Mental Health: Risk, Promise, Responsibility by Prof. Irina Gurevych on Sep.30

自然言語処理分野でご活躍のProf. Iryna Gurevych (the UKP Lab at TU Darmstadt)にご講演いただくことになりました。ぜひご参加ください。
オンラインでの参加はどなたでも可能です。
Online Venue: Open to all registered participants. The seminar will be delivered via Zoom. The URL will be provided only to registered participants.

Abstract

More than a billion people live with a mental health condition, yet care remains scarce and often a poor fit for the person receiving it — so people increasingly turn to unsupervised chatbots to fill the gap. Because language is the richest signal we have into someone’s psychological state, natural language processing is the key to doing this better. In this talk, I argue that NLP can genuinely help — but solving it takes clinical grounding, real data, and responsible evaluation, not just larger models. Drawing on work from my group, I show how large language models can turn therapy transcripts into treatment-relevant structure, how clinically grounded synthetic data eases the field’s privacy bottleneck, and why evaluation must reflect what clinicians actually care about — not just what’s easy to benchmark. I close with an invitation to build mental health AI that is personalized, privacy-aware, and responsibly evaluated: tools that support clinicians, not replace them.
Team’s web site: https://psych.ukp-lab.de/

Short Bio

Iryna Gurevych is Professor of Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing in the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. She also is an adjunct professor at MBZUAI in Abu-Dhabi, UAE, and an affiliated professor at INSAIT in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is widely known for fundamental contributions to natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. Professor Gurevych is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the leading professional society in NLP. Her many accolades include being a Fellow of the ACL, an ELLIS Fellow, and the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant. Most recently, she has received the 2025 Milner award of the British Royal Society for her major contributions to NLP and artificial intelligence that combine deep understanding of human language and cognitive faculty with the latest paradigms in machine learning.