Vera C. Kaelin

Also published as: Vera C Kaelin


2024

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CareCorpus+: Expanding and Augmenting Caregiver Strategy Data to Support Pediatric Rehabilitation
Shahla Farzana | Ivana Lucero | Vivian Villegas | Vera C Kaelin | Mary Khetani | Natalie Parde
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Caregiver strategy classification in pediatric rehabilitation contexts is strongly motivated by real-world clinical constraints but highly under-resourced and seldom studied in natural language processing settings. We introduce a large dataset of 4,037 caregiver strategies in this setting, a five-fold increase over the nearest contemporary dataset. These strategies are manually categorized into clinically established constructs with high agreement (đťś…=0.68-0.89). We also propose two techniques to further address identified data constraints. First, we manually supplement target task data with publicly relevant data from online child health forums. Next, we propose a novel data augmentation technique to generate synthetic caregiver strategies with high downstream task utility. Extensive experiments showcase the quality of our dataset. They also establish evidence that both the publicly available data and the synthetic strategies result in large performance gains, with relative F1 increases of 22.6% and 50.9%, respectively.

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CareCorpus: A Corpus of Real-World Solution-Focused Caregiver Strategies for Personalized Pediatric Rehabilitation Service Design
Mina Valizadeh | Vera C. Kaelin | Mary A. Khetani | Natalie Parde
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

In pediatric rehabilitation services, one intervention approach involves using solution-focused caregiver strategies to support children in their daily life activities. The manual sharing of these strategies is not scalable, warranting need for an automated approach to recognize and select relevant strategies. We introduce CareCorpus, a dataset of 780 real-world strategies written by caregivers. Strategies underwent dual-annotation by three trained annotators according to four established rehabilitation classes (i.e., environment/context, n=325 strategies; a child’s sense of self, n=151 strategies; a child’s preferences, n=104 strategies; and a child’s activity competences, n=62 strategies) and a no-strategy class (n=138 instances) for irrelevant or indeterminate instances. The average percent agreement was 80.18%, with a Cohen’s Kappa of 0.75 across all classes. To validate this dataset, we propose multi-grained classification tasks for detecting and categorizing strategies, and establish new performance benchmarks ranging from F1=0.53-0.79. Our results provide a first step towards a smart option to sort caregiver strategies for use in designing pediatric rehabilitation care plans. This novel, interdisciplinary resource and application is also anticipated to generalize to other pediatric rehabilitation service contexts that target children with developmental need.