Corpora: ACL-02 Workshop: Natural Language Processing in the Biomedical Domain

[Stephen B. Johnson, PhD]

ACL-02 Workshop

Natural Language Processing in the Biomedical Domain

July 11 - 12
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA

Sponsored by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA),
Special Interest Group on Natural Language Processing (NLP-SIG).

Workshop Description

The aim of this workshop is to focus on challenges in processing
biomedical language and to present results in developing techniques for
this domain.  Biomedicine comprises biological sciences, clinical
medicine, public health and education. This domain presents many
opportunities for NLP technologies such as information extraction from
biomedical texts, document and answer retrieval from large, unstructured
text collections (such as the biomedical literature and the World Wide
Web), and interaction with users through natural language.  Until
recently, the level of collaboration between core computational
linguistics researchers and the biomedical informatics community has
been limited.  The purpose of this workshop is to take active steps
towards bridging that gap. Indeed, this would be the first workshop
under the auspices of the ACL entirely devoted to biomedical language
processing.

The biomedical informatics community conducts basic research on natural
language processing, but has a strong focus on practical applications,
large-scale systems, and rigorous evaluation to show real-world impact.
They have helped develop a number of large, complex resources for
biomedical terminology, such as the Unified Medical Language System
(UMLS), International Classification of Disease (ICD), Systematized
Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED), Human Genome Organization (HUGO) Gene
Nomenclature, and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).  There is also
substantial experience with large corpora, deployed system prototypes
and statistical techniques.  The computational linguistics community can
benefit from these experiences and resources, while contributing recent
technologies and methodologies.  The biomedical domain presents many
exciting challenges for collaboration between both communities.

We envision the outcome of this workshop to consist of concrete steps
towards establishing links between research groups from both camps for
future interactions.

We invite submissions including but not limited to the following areas:

·       Information extraction
·       Information retrieval
·       Natural language interfaces
·       Text mining
·       Text summarization
·       Speech recognition
·       Integration of system components
·       Lexicon and terminology acquisition
·       Characterization of biomedical language
·       Evaluation of biomedical applications

Format for Submission

Authors are requested to submit one electronic version of their papers
OR four hardcopies. Please submit hardcopies only if electronic
submission is impossible. Maximum length is 8 pages including figures
and references. Please conform to the traditional two-column ACL
Proceedings format.  Style files can be downloaded from
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/acl02/style/

Email submissions should be sent to: sbj2 at columbia.edu

Hard copy submissions should be sent to:

Stephen Johnson
Department of Medical Informatics
Columbia University
622 West 168th Street
New York, NY 10032

Timetable

Paper Submission Deadline	Mar 15
Acceptance Notification	Apr 19
Final Version Deadline	May 17

Organizers

Stephen Johnson (Columbia University), chair AMIA NLP-SIG
Udo Hahn (Freiburg University, Germany)
Judith Klavans (Columbia University)

Program Committee

Robert Baud (University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland)
Carol Friedman  (Queens University, USA)
Robert Futrelle (Northeastern University, USA)
Lynette Hirschman (Mitre Corporation, USA)
Tom Rindflesch (National Library of Medicine, USA)
Donia Scott (University of Brighton, UK)
Jun-Ichi Tsujii (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Nina Wacholder (Rutgers University, USA)
Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh, UK)
W. John Wilbur National Center for Biotechnology Information, USA)
Pierre Zweigenbaum (Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris)