CALL FOR PAPERS

The 3rd RANLP NLP for Medicine and Biology workshop 2013 will continue the traditions established by its earlier editions in 2009 and 2011. It will be held on September 13, 2013 in Hisar, Bulgaria. Biomedical NLP deals with the processing of healthcare-related text - clinical documents created by the physicians at the point of care, scientific publications in the areas of biology and medicine and consumer healthcare text such as social media blogs. 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), the TREC Electronic Medical Records track, the US-funded Strategic Health Advanced Research Projects Area 4 (www.sharpn.org) and the Shared Annotated Resources (ShARe; https://sites.google.com/site/shareclefehealth/task-description;
www.clinicalnlpannotations.org) project. Meanwhile, the number of abstracts in PubMed continues to grow exponentially. Text in the form of blogs created by patients discussing various healthcare topics has emerged as another source with a new perspective on health-related issues. Connecting the information from the three main sources in multiple languages – the scientific community, the healthcare provider and the healthcare consumer -- presents new challenges.

The Biomedical NLP Workshop at RANLP 2013 will provide a venue for presentations 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 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

Important dates:

Submission deadline: 3 July 2013
Notification of acceptance: 2 August 2013
Camera-ready copy due from authors: 16 August 2013
Workshop: 13 September 2013

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/ranlp2013/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 submissions are 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:

Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester, UK
William Baumgartner, University of Colorado, USA
Svetla Boytcheva, American University in Bulgaria, BG
Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine, USA
Dmitriy Dligach, Childrens Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, USA
Timothy Miller, Childrens Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, USA
Sameer Pradhan, Childrens Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, USA
Angus Roberts, University of Sheffield, UK

Workshop venue:

The workshop will be held on Friday, September 13, 2013 in conjunction with RANLP 2013 in Hissar, Bulgaria. See the RANLP 2013 web site at http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2013 for further details.

Contact us at: NLPMedBio2013 [at] lml [dot] bas [dot] bg