*** Workshop program is available here ***

*** Draft of the workshop proceedings is available here ***

CALL FOR PAPERS

Biomedical NLP Workshop associated with RANLP 2017

Hotel “Cherno More”, Varna, Bulgaria
8 September 2017 (during RANLP 2017)
http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2017/bioNLP2017/


The 4th Biomedical NLP Workshop at RANLP 2017 will continue the traditions established by its earlier editions in 2009, 2011 and 2013, and will provide a venue for presentation of current work in this field. 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 as well as 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. We now have access to large bodies of texts in electronic medical records. The number of abstracts in PubMed continues to grow exponentially. Informal texts in medical blogs and forums, created by patients and doctors discussing various healthcare topics, have emerged as another source with a new perspective on health-related issues.

Submissions in the areas of medicine and biology are both welcome, as is research on NLP for clinical documents, scientific publications in the areas of biology and medicine, and web-based content in blogs, forums and other materials.

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

  • Development of annotated resources and gold standard corpora
  • Entity identification and normalisation for a broad range of semantic categories
  • Extraction of relations and events
  • Ontologies and controlled vocabularies
  • Text mining
  • NLP applications in biomedical domain: summarisation, question answering, information extraction
  • Integration of free text and structured data mining
  • Integration of NLP components into applications for secondary use of EHR data
  • Non-English and multilingual language processing
  • Processing texts in medical blogs and forums
  • Biomedical NLP systems testing and evaluation

Important dates:

  • Submission deadline: 8 July 2017 19 July 2017
  • Notification of acceptance: 2 August 2017
  • Camera-ready copy due from authors: 25 August 2017
  • Workshop: 8th September 2017

Organising committee:

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

Programme Committee:

Galia Angelova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)
Svetla Boytcheva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)
Noa Cruz (Virgen del Rocio Hospital, Seville)
George Giannakopoulos (NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens)
Sergei O. Kuznetsov (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
Agnieszka Mykowiecka (Polish Academy of Sciences)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU)
Ivelina Nikolova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)
George Petasis (NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens)
Guergana Savova (Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School)
Frédérique Segond (Viseo Group, Grenoble)
Dimitar Tcharaktchiev (Medical University Sofia)

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.

Submission instructions: We invite regular papers 8 pages (excluding references) as well as demo papers and project notes up to 6 pages (excluding references). Submissions are maintained by the START system, if authors want to submit an article, they should go here. The authors should use the stylesheets at RANLP submission page and follow the guidelines there. All articles, accepted for presentation, will appear in the Workshop Proceedings and will be uploaded at the ACL Anthology.

Workshop venue: The workshop is being held in conjunction with RANLP 2017 in Varna, Bulgaria. Please follow the RANLP 2017 web site for further details.

Contacts: NLPMedBio2017 [at] lml [dot] bas [dot] bg