BIONLP 2009

A NAACL HLT 2009 Workshop
Boulder, CO June 4-5, 2009
Workshop submissions due: March 12, 2009, 11:59 PM Eastern US
Workshop web site: http://compbio.uchsc.edu/BioNLP2009/index.shtml

Continuing a successful series of annual BioNLP workshops at ACL and NAACL starting in 2002, and in accordance with the ACL SIGBIOMED (www.sigbiomed.org) tradition of presenting work on a broad range of topics, we invite submissions on any topic of current interest in the field of Biomedical Natural Language Processing.

We especially encourage submissions on:

* Entity identification and normalization for a broad range
of semantic categories
* Ontologies and knowledge bases in BioNLP
* Extraction of complex relations
* The economics of text mining and database curation
* Processing of various text and document types (clinical narrative,
gray literature, blogs, email)
* Resources and novel strategies for system testing and evaluation
* Shared tasks in the biomedical domain
* Test suites and corpora for BioNLP
* Quantifying utility to end-users
* Portability for non-developers
* Summarization
* Question-answering
* Full text and figures
* Practical applications of NLP in the biomedical domain

For the first time, there will be a shared task associated with this year's BioNLP meeting. Results of this shared task on bio-event extraction will be presented during the second day of the BioNLP09 workshop. Information on the shared task is available at http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/GENIA/SharedTask/.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: Thursday, March 12, 2009
Notification of acceptance: Monday, April 6, 2009
Camera-ready copy due from authors: Monday, April 20, 2009
Workshop: June 4, 2009
Shared task presentations: June 5, 2009

Submission instructions:

Two types of submissions are invited: full papers and poster abstracts. Submissions are due by 11:59 PM EST on March 12, 2009. Submit your
paper or abstract via the NAACL HLT BioNLP 2009 site at https://www.softconf.com/naacl-hlt09/BioNLP2009/. Note that the review of papers on the shared task will be handled separately, by the task organizers.

Full papers should not exceed eight (8) pages of text and one page of references. These are intended to be reports of original research. BioNLP aims to be the forum for interesting, innovative, and promising work involving biomedicine and language technology, whether or not yielding high performance at the moment. This by no means precludes our interest in and preference for mature results, strong performance, and thorough evaluation. Both types of research and combinations thereof are encouraged.

Poster abstracts should not exceed two (2) pages. Accepted abstracts will be published in a separate section of the workshop proceedings. Appropriate poster topics include preliminary results, application notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc.

Submissions must be electronic and in PDF format, and should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings. Ensure that you are *not* in A4 format. Please see the conference website for detailed typesetting specifications. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available on the NAACL HLT meeting website (http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/stylefiles.html). Submissions need not be anonymous. Authors who cannot submit a PDF file electronically should contact the workshop organizers well in advance
of the submission deadline.

Dual submission policy: note that papers may not be submitted to the BioNLP 2009 workshop if they are or will be concurrently submitted to another meeting or publication and that other meeting or publication prohibits dual submissions. If your paper is also submitted to ISMB or AMIA, you should expect it to be rejected by ISMB and AMIA. If your paper is or will be concurrently under consideration by another meeting or publication, notify us of that fact in a footnote on the first page. Do not dual-submit your BioNLP 2009 workshop paper to ISMB or AMIA.

* Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, University of Colorado School of Medicine
* Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine
* Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining
and University of Manchester, UK
* John Pestian, Computational Medicine Center, Cincinnati Children's
Hospital and Medical Center
* Jun-ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Japan
and University of Manchester, UK
* Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh, UK