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About

About

Carla Teixeira Lopes is an assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal. She is also a researcher at INESC TEC since 2014. She received a PhD in Informatics Engineering from the University of Porto in 2013. Her research interests lie at the intersection of information retrieval and human-computer interaction. She is interested in studying information search behaviour and in developing tools that help people search more successfully. Lately, she has been focused in exploring how context can help improve the experience of health consumers searching the Web.

Interest
Topics
Details

Details

  • Name

    Carla Lopes
  • Role

    Senior Researcher
  • Since

    01st May 2014
005
Publications

2026

Evidence-Based Activism and Knowledge Co-production: A Case Study of Online Communities on Therapeutic Cannabis

Authors
Teixeira, AR; Lopes, CT;

Publication
EMERGING TRENDS IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGIES, WORLDCIST 2025, VOL 1

Abstract
This study examines the role of online health communities in Brazil dedicated to cannabis treatments for chronic diseases as platforms for evidence-based activism. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research combines qualitative analysis with computational techniques, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, to analyze six online groups from WhatsApp and Facebook. Key themes emerging from the analysis include treatment per pathology, treatment effects, access barriers, peer support, and advocacy efforts. The findings reveal how these communities act as epistemic networks, where patients and caregivers co-produce knowledge by sharing personal experiences and engaging in dialogue with healthcare professionals. This study highlights how online health communities transform experience sharing into structured evidence, enabling collective action to address barriers such as limited access to cannabis-based treatments. It underscores the potential of digital platforms to empower patients, foster collaboration with healthcare professionals, and influence health governance.

2026

Enhancing Knowledge Access in Online Health Communities: A Chatbot Prototype for Cannabis Treatment Support

Authors
Teixeira, AR; Lopes, CT;

Publication
EMERGING TRENDS IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGIES, WORLDCIST 2025, VOL 2

Abstract
Online health communities enable patients and caregivers to share experiences, seek advice, and collaboratively generate knowledge about treatments and condition. However, accessing relevant information often proves challenging due to platform limitations like insufficient search functionalities. A previous study identified key topics discussed in Brazilian online health groups centered on cannabis treatments for chronic diseases. Building on these findings, this study introduces a proof-of-concept chatbot designed to enhance access to the collective knowledge within these communities. The chatbot prototype, built using Google Dialogflow, was tailored to provide contextually relevant, accurate, and user-friendly responses. A user study involving 38 participants evaluated its performance, showing high user satisfaction, task completion rates, and trust in the information provided. The results highlight the chatbot's potential enhance knowledge accessibility, promote patient engagement, and support evidence-based activism by organizing and disseminating community-generated content effectively.

2026

Real-Time Prediction of Wikipedia Articles' Quality

Authors
Moás, PM; Lopes, CT;

Publication
LINKING THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DIGITAL LIBRARIES, TPDL 2025

Abstract
Wikipedia is the largest and most globally well-known online encyclopedia, but its collaborative nature leads to a significant disparity in article quality. In this work, we explore real-time and automatic quality assessment within Wikipedia through machine-learning. We first constructed a dataset of 36,000 English articles and 145 features, then compared the performance of multiple classification and regression algorithms and studied how the number of classes and features affects the model's performance. The six-class experiments achieved a classifier accuracy of 64% and a mean absolute error of 0.09 in regression methods, which matches or beats most state-of-the-art approaches. Our model produces similar results on some non-English Wikipedias, but the error is slightly higher on other versions. We have also determined that the features measuring the article's content and revision history bring the largest performance boost.

2026

Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2026, Seattle, WA, USA, March 22-26, 2026

Authors
Shah, C; White, RW; Fourney, A; Lopes, CT; Trippas, JR;

Publication
CHIIR

Abstract

2025

Harnessing Large Language Models for Clinical Information Extraction: A Systematic Literature Review

Authors
Rodrigues, T; Lopes, CT;

Publication
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTING FOR HEALTHCARE

Abstract
Electronic Health Records store extensive patient health data, playing a crucial role in healthcare management. Extracting information from these text-heavy records is difficult due to their domain-specific vocabulary, which challenges applying general-domain techniques. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and an increasing interest in the field have sparked considerable progress in solving Clinical Information Extraction (IE) tasks. We review these applications in Clinical IE, highlighting the most common tasks, most successful methods, and most used datasets and evaluation criteria. Examining 85 studies, we synthesize and organize the current research trends, highlighting common points between papers. The presence of LLMs can be felt in the most common tasks, with novel approaches being attempted and showing promising results. However, breakthroughs are still necessary in designing reliable end-to-end systems that can perform all the Clinical IE tasks within a single system.