Susan McRoy

Dr. McRoy’s work aims to address the difficulty people have in obtaining useful health information from text documents.  She hopes to improve overall health by creating and implementing more accurate and easy-to-use forms. In turn, this will help scientists and clinicians improve the quality and cost of healthcare by quickly getting scientific findings into clinical practice.

Education

• PhD, Computer Science, University of Toronto, 1993
• MS, Computer Science, University of Toronto, 1987
• BS, Computer and Communication Science, University of Michigan, 1985

Research Interests

Using natural language processing, information retrieval, user modeling, and artificial intelligence  to create intelligent natural language dialog systems and extract information from biomedical texts.

Publications

• McRoy, Susan. "Principles of Natural Language Processing", (2021): ISBN 9781737659501.
• Shimpi, Neel, Susan McRoy, Huimin Zhao, Min Wu, and Amit Acharya. "Development of a periodontitis risk assessment model for primary care providers in an interdisciplinary setting." Technology and Health Care 28, no. 2 (2020): 143-154.
• Scholl, Catelyn, and Susan McRoy. "Using Gestures to Resolve Lexical Ambiguity in Storytelling with Humanoid Robots." Dialogue & Discourse 10, no. 1 (2019): 20-33.
• McRoy, S., Rastegar-Mojarad, M., Wang, Y., Ruddy, K., Haddad, T., and Liu, H. “Assessing Unmet Information Needs of Breast Cancer Survivors: Exploratory Study of Online Health Forums Using Text Classification and Retrieval” JMIR Cancer 4(1):e10, doi:10.2196/cancer.9050, 2018.
• McRoy, S., Jones, S. and Kurmally, A. “Towards Automated Classification of Consumers’ Cancer Related Questions with a New Taxonomy of Expected Answer Types” Health Informatics Journal, 1460458215571643 (doi:10.1177/1460458215571643), 2015.
• McRoy, S., Cramer, E. M., and Hayeon Song, “Assessing
  Technologies for Information-Seeking on Prostate Cancer Screening by Low-Income Men”, Journal of Patient-Centered Research and Reviews, 2014 1(4): 188-196.
• Song, H., Vaidhyanathan, V., Cramer, E. M., Owais, R. W., and McRoy, S. “A two-way text-messaging system answering health questions for low-income pregnant women” Patient Education and Counseling,  2013 [PMID: 23711635].
• McRoy, S., Vaidhyanathan, V., May, A. and Hayeon Song, An Open Architecture for Messaging-Based Consumer-Health Question-Answering Proceedings of the Second ACM International Health Informatics Symposium (IHI 2012) January 2012.
• Prasad, R., McRoy, S., Frid, N., Yu, H. and Joshi, A., BioDRB: The Biomedical Discourse Relation Bank, BMC Bioinformatics 12, 2011
• Kurmally, A., Di Eugenio, B., Kahn, C., and McRoy, S., “Building a Corpus and Developing a Question Classifier to Support Messaging-Based Question Answering”, Proceedings of the First ACM International Health Informatics Symposium (IHI 2010), November 2010.

Awards, Honors and Societies

• NSF CAREER Award - Integrating Multiple Knowledge Sources for Robust Human-Machine Communication, 1997

Community Involvement

• Milwaukee Men's Health Referral Network