AAAI 2012 Fall Symposium on Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery in Biomedical Text
November 2-4, 2012 Arlington, VA, USA

The amount of biological and medical literature has grown exponentially within the last decade. This data maybe in the form of journal citations in PubMed, in the form of clinical summaries in healthcare institutions or in the form of blogs and user comments that express personal opinions on the different healthcare topics such as drug adverse effects or disease treatments. This material, be it expressed by researchers, medical professionals or medical care receivers, is of significant importance in terms of the wealth of information that it possesses. However it is only valuable if efficient and reliable ways of accessing and analyzing that information are available.

In this symposium we would like to address novel research on computational techniques for natural language processing, as well as novel applications of existing techniques to the open problems in text processing in biomedical domain. We intend to invite several speakers from the biomedical text processing community who will present current research problems in this field, and we will invite contributed talks on novel learning approaches that can improve the analysis and retrieval of biological and medical information.

We solicit two types of submissions to the symposium:

1. Contributed talks and/or posters
We invite submissions that address new algorithmic and methodological contributions to the spectrum of problems in biomedical text analysis, where textual resources can include semi-structured and unstructured biomedical text, clinical text, social media and any other healthcare related text media.

2. Open problems
For open problems, we request the authors to prepare a few slides that clearly
present, motivate, and explain an important open problem in text analysis and information retrieval in biomedical domain. The main goal here
is to foster active discussion.

Papers for the symposium will be collected and made into an AAAI technical report, which will be distributed to attendees on CD and included in the AAAI Digital Library. The issuance of technical report allows the work to be cited.

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission Deadline : May 25, 2012
Notification of acceptance : June 22, 2012
Camera-ready papers : September 7, 2012
AAAI 2012 Fall Symposium : November 2-4, 2012

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to direct your questions to
Rezarta.Islamaj@nih.gov or Lana.Yeganova@nih.gov


AAAI 2012 Fall Symposium Organizers:
Lana Yeganova, PhD, Staff Scientist, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.
Rezarta Islamaj Dogan, PhD, Research Fellow, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.
Vahan Grigoryan, PhD, Associate, Cloud Analytics Group, Booz Allen Hamilton.
Mark Dredze, PhD, Assistant Research Professor, Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University.