Workshop: Biomedical Natural
Language Processing

http://www.lml.bas.bg/ranlp2011/biomedicalNLP
15 September 2011

in conjunction with
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

12-14 September 2011, Hissar, Bulgaria

 

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The International Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing
is partially supported by:

The National Science Fund, Bulgaria,
via contact EVTIMA DO 02-292/December 2008
with the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies,
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Workshop Programme is now available

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Biomedical natural language processing deals with the application of text mining techniques to clinical documents and to scientific publications in the areas of biology and medicine. Recent years have seen dramatic changes in the types and amount of data available to researchers in this field.  Where most research on publications in the past has dealt with the abstracts of journal articles, we now have access to the full texts of journal articles via PubMedCentral.  Where research on clinical documents has been hampered by a lack of availability of data, we now have access to large bodies of data through the auspices of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital NLP Challenge, the i2b2 shared tasks (www.i2b2.org), and the new TREC Electronic Medical Records track as well as gold standard data being generated under US-funded Strategic Health Advanced Research Projects Area 4 (www.sharpn.org).  Meanwhile, the number of abstracts in PubMed continues to grow exponentially.  These are exciting times for biomedical NLP.

The Biomedical NLP Workshop at RANLP 2011 will provide a venue for presentation of current work in this field.  Submissions in the areas of medicine and biology are both welcome, as is research on the genres of publications, clinical documents, and web-based materials.

Topics of interest are focused exclusively on biomedical text and include, but are not limited to:

- Basic natural language processing techniques, such as sentence boundary detection, tokenization, part of speech tagging, and shallow parsing
- Named entity recognition
- Concept recognition and normalization
- Ontologies and controlled vocabularies
- Semantic role labeling
- Relation extraction
- Summarization
- Integration of free text and structured data mining
- Patient-reported observations
- Knowledge representation and management
- Non-English and multilingual language processing
- Evaluation and testing of text mining systems
- Applications of biomedical information extraction such as question-answering, patient cohort identification, decision support systems, direct patient care
- Integration of NLP components into applications for secondary use of EHR data

Important dates:

Submission deadline: 25 June 2011
EXTENDED submission deadline: 10 July 2011
Notification of acceptance: 25 July 2011
Camera-ready copy due from authors: 22 August 2011
Workshop: 15 or 16 September, 2011

Submission instructions:

We invite regular papers 8 pages (excluding references) as well as demo papers and project notes 4 pages (excluding references). Submissions will be maintained by the START system. The authors should use the templates at http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2011/submissions.php and follow the guidelines there. All articles, accepted for presentation, will appear in the Workshop Proceedings and will be uploaded at the ACL Anthology.

If you want to make a submission now, please proceed to START.

Review and multiple submission policy

All submissions should be anonymous.  Submissions will be reviewed by three members of the program committee.

The workshop calls for papers describing original research.  Multiple submission is not permitted.  If your paper is under review at any other venue, it will be rejected from the workshop without review.

Organizing committee:

Guergana Savova (Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School)
Kevin Bretonnel Cohen (University of Colorado School of Medicine)
Galia Angelova (IICT Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)

Program Committee:

Stéfan Darmoni (Rouen University Hospital)
Vangelis Karkaletsis (Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, Athens)
Dimitris Kokkinakis (Gothenburg University)
Frédérique Segond (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble)
More to be announced

Workshop venue:

The workshop is being held in conjunction with RANLP 2011 in Hissarya, Bulgaria.  See the RANLP 2011 web site at http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2011 for further details.

Contact us at: biomedNLP2011 [at] lml [dot] bas [dot] bg