School of Information Sciences

Hoang defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Linh Hoang successfully defended her dissertation, "Natural Language Processing to Support Evidence Quality Assessment of Biomedical Literature," on December 8.

Her committee included Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu (chair), Professor Bertram Ludäscher, Associate Professor Jana Diesner, and Richard David Boyce, associate professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Abstract: Evidence Synthesis is the process of synthesizing information from clinical literature to translate the research findings into patient care and healthcare policy. Throughout the evidence synthesis process, a critical yet challenging step is the quality assessment of clinical studies. Quality in research can be considered through two aspects: methodological quality which concerns how rigorously a research is designed and conducted, and reporting quality which describes how transparently a piece of scientific work is reported as a publication. This thesis explores natural language processing (NLP) approaches to support evidence quality assessment of clinical studies. Specifically, I consider different levels of information granularity used for evidence assessment, and implemented three machine learning developments: (1) Classification of evidence types from clinical publications based on study designs, (2) Classification of sentences from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with checklist items recommended in reporting guidelines, (3) Extraction of fine-grained methodological characteristics from RCTs to assist methodological quality assessment. Applications of these NLP approaches range from assisting authors in checking their manuscripts for compliance with reporting guidelines and supporting journal editors and peer reviewers in assessing papers (pre-publication) to assisting systematic reviewers in synthesizing evidence and meta-researchers in studying research rigor and transparency (post-publication). 

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Get to know Jade Carthans, BSIS student

Jade Carthans is interested in how human-centered design, machine learning, and data analytics can come together to solve critical problems that impact organizations and individuals. She gained firsthand experience in these areas through internships with Microsoft and State Farm.

Jade Carthans

Join the iSchool at the 2025 ALISE annual conference

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place from October 6–8 in Kansas City, Missouri. The theme of the 2025 conference is "Decolonising Pedagogies: Agency, Identity, Practices."

Ravury selected to serve on Homecoming Court

BSIS student Lauren Ravury has a new item to add to her resume: member of the 2025 Homecoming Court at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ravury's resume is already impressive. She serves as president of the Student Alumni Ambassadors (SAA), an organization dedicated to fostering school spirit at the U. of I. Last year, she served as president of the Asian Pre-Law Association, a stint that led to her receiving the Outstanding Asian & Asian American Undergraduate Student Leader Award from the Asian American Cultural Center and the association being named the 2025 Outstanding Asian & Asian American Student Organization.

Lauren Ravury

Wang appointed to Autism Data Privacy Advisory Group

Professor Yang Wang has been appointed by Governor JB Pritzker to serve on the newly created Autism Data Privacy Advisory Group, established under Executive Order 2025-02 to strengthen protections for the civil and human rights of people with autism in Illinois. 

Yang Wang

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top