Anuja Tayal

UIC PhD NLP.

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I am a Ph.D. Scholar at University of Illinois, Chicago under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Di Eugenio in the field of Natural Language Processing .

My research interests include solving various problems using NLP approaches.

  • Exploring conversational architectures that deliver self-care information to African American patients with heart failure.
  • Proposed a neuro-symbolic dialogue system to help heart failure patients monitor salt intake.
  • Examined different prompting strategies for LLMs to generate synthetic conversations in the absence of patient-oriented self-care dialogues.
  • Conducted a user study with African American Heart Failure patients to understand how they perceive information by asking them to interact with 2 versions of dialog systems.
  • Exploring different ways to combine the strengths of task-oriented dialog systems (TODS) and LMs/LLMs to create a hybrid dialog model.

I am always looking for interesting reasearch based internship opportunities. I always welcome the opportunity to collaborate and discuss my research. Please feel free to reach out to me via email if you’re interested.

news

Aug 25-29,2025 Attending the SIGdial'25 Conference in Avignon, France and presenting my paper on 'Towards conversational assistants for health applications: using ChatGPT to generate conversations about heart failure'.
July 2025 News article published on UIC Today about our team's success at the CAIDF Hackathon.
Jun 11, 2025 Successfully defended my PhD proposal and officialy a PhD candidate!
May ,2025 Team won 2nd place at CAIDF Hackathon where we Developed Discharge Pathfinder, an LLM tool that streamlines NICU discharge by simplifying medical jargon to support caregivers and improve patient outcomes.
May 20, 2024 Attending the LREC-Coling'24 Conference Virtually where my paper 'A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Monitoring Salt Content in Food' was accepted in CL4Health workshop.
May 13, 2024 Attending The Web Conference'24 (WWW) Virtually where my paper 'Dynamic Contexts for Generating Suggestion Questions in RAG Based Conversational Systems' was accepted in PromptEng 2024 workshop.
Oct 12, 2023 Poster abstract accepted for the Mitigating AI Risk through Ethical Data Science Workshop at the 2023 AMIA Symposium.
Jun 15 - Aug 21, 2023 Interning as NLP R&D Data Scientist Intern at P&G (Proctor & Gamble), Mason
Apr 20, 2023 In San Francisco for CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women
Jan 20, 2023 Accepted to a three month Google's Computer Science Research Mentorship Program (CSRMP) that matches students with Google mentors and peers to support their pursuit of computer science research pathways.