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Call for Abstracts
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Workshop BioTM-2010
Advances in Bio Text Mining

May 10-11, 2010, Ghent, Belgium

http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/BioTM2010/index.html

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Abstracts are invited for the two-day workshop to be held in Ghent on the 10th and
11th of May 2010.

Text mining has become indispensible in many biological and biomedical sciences.
Having to keep up with an increasing number of publications, text mining techniques
enable retrieval and analysis of large amounts of documents in a fully automated
fashion. They allow for extraction of facts described in the literature that have
not yet been recorded in databases, thus providing a necessary tool to obtain a
complete overview of all available knowledge.

Recently, the application of text mining and natural language processing techniques
to the biological and medical sciences has recieved increasing interest. In addition
to many new workshops and conferences arising in this domain, recently also a number
of community-wide tasks were conducted to benchmark text mining techniques on
specific challenges (e.g. BioCreative, BioNLP Shared Task, ...).

By discussing the latest developments and potentially new applications in text
mining amongst scientists in both academia and industry, this workshop aims to
provide a broad view on text mining tools in biology and biomedicine. We are
reaching out to a broad public, including researchers with an interest in text
mining but with little or no experience in this domain. To this end, the workshop
will start with an extensive tutorial on text mining in the bio-sciences, providing
sufficient background knowledge for novices.

Next, a number of keynote talks will be given by leading scientists, presenting the
latest advances in the field. Furthermore, participants are highly encouraged to
submit an abstract describing their own work. They will be given the opportunity to
present this work in 5min flash presentations, as well as to present a poster during
the coffee and lunch breaks.

Finally, we plan on having a round-table discussion about the broader applicability
of text-mining tools in the biological sciences, trying to bridge the gap between
theoretical algorithms and experimental work.

SCOPE

Submissions should present work related to any aspect of biomedical text mining and
bioinformatics. Additionally, we strongly encourage submissions that describe
shortcomings of current existing techniques, tools, or resources, in order to detect
problematic issues and work towards their improvement.


SUBMISSIONS

Participants are encouraged to submit a poster to the workshop in order to present
their work to the audience. Posters will be first introduced in a five minute bullet
talk and then they will be presented in a poster session. Submitted posters will be
reviewed by the organising committee. Submission is blind.

An abstract of the poster of maximum 500 words should be submitted to the following
e-mail address in pdf format: biotm2010 at gmail dot com .


IMPORTANT DATES

1 April 2010 Submission deadline
15 April 2010 Notification of acceptance
10-11 May 2010 Workshop in Ghent

ORGANISATION / PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Yvan Saeys
Sofie Van Landeghem

Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Genomics group
VIB Department of Plant Systems Biology
Ghent University
Belgium

Walter Daelemans
Roser Morante
Vincent Van Asch

CLiPS - Text Mining Group
Faculty of Arts
University of Antwerp
Belgium