Embeddings and other
Vector-based Representations
in Biomedical and Clinical Text

Full Day Workshop at IEEE ICHI 2019
http://www.ieee-ichi.org/
Beijing, China, June 10, 2019

Call for Papers:
Neural embedding methods have made a huge splash in NLP, and many researchers are exploring applications for mining biomedical articles and clinical text. The recency and momentum of this field might be enough reason to motivate a workshop on this topic. However, there has also been a burst of creative explorations in the biomedical arena: Augmenting neural embeddings with context, disambiguation and semantics; building in sequential and discourse information; hyperbolic embeddings; and asymmetric relations for sentence entailment, to name a few. There have also been explorations of vector representations of text that are not based on neural embeddings: For example, implicit similarity metrics; high dimensional predication spaces; neurobiological-based vector dimensions; and noncommutative concept relations defined using quantum logic.
This workshop aims to explore the latest methodological advances in vector representations of words, sentences, and documents, and their applications to downstream tasks. These tasks range from text classification and summarization, to patient phenotyping and cohort discovery, to sentiment analysis and prediction of suicide risk, to literature based discovery. This workshop will also make an effort to stimulate the establishment of shared community resources that will allow different groups to take advantage of others’ code and datasets, and thus make it easier for groups to compare methods on different downstream tasks.
To increase the diversity of ideas and people represented at the workshop, we will attempt to utilize Skype or a similar web-based platform to allow registered participants, who are unable to travel to Beijing, to make remote presentations and participate in the discussions. (However, due to the vagaries of the internet, we cannot guarantee the quality or connectivity of remote participation.)

Important dates
Paper submission deadline: March 8, 2019
Notification of acceptance: April 5, 2019
Camera-ready version due: May 3, 2019
Workshop date: June 10, 2019

Submission Guidelines
All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. Proceedings of the workshop will be included in the proceedings of the main conference. The workshop will accept both regular and short papers as well as posters:
• Regular papers (8-10 pages, references not counted towards the page limit) will describe mature ideas, where a substantial amount of implementation, experimentation, or data collection and analysis has been completed.
• Short papers (2-6 pages, excluding references) will describe innovative ideas, where preliminary implementation and validation work have been conducted.
• Posters (1-2 page abstract, excluding references), similar to short paper submissions, will describe innovative ideas and where preliminary implementation and validation work has been conducted.
All submissions will be peer reviewed by the program committee in single-blind fashion (submissions should have the names and affiliations of authors listed on the paper). Highly ranked regular and short papers will be considered for oral presentation slots, with secondary consideration given to ensuring adequate diversity of ideas and topics. Papers not accepted for an oral presentation slot will automatically be considered for poster presentation opportunities.
Submission link: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ichi2019

Program Committee

• Neil R. Smalheiser, University of Illinois at Chicago (Chair)
• Peter Bruza, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
• Aaron M. Cohen, Oregon Health & Science University
• Trevor Cohen, University of Washington
• Xiaoqian Jiang, University of Texas at Houston
• Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa, Italy
• Martha Lewis, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Hongfang Liu, Mayo Clinic Rochester
• Zhiyong Lu, National Library of Medicine, USA
• Bridget T. McInnes, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Jimeng Sun, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Chengxiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign