Workshop "Biomedical Natural Language Processing", in conjunction with RANLP-2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

Biomedical natural language processing deals with the application of text mining techniques to clinical documents and to scientific publications in the areas of biology and medicine. Recent years have seen dramatic changes in the types and amount of data available to researchers in this field. Where most research on publications in the past has dealt with the abstracts of journal articles, we now have access to the full texts of journal articles via PubMedCentral. Where research on clinical documents has been hampered by a lack of availability of data, we now have access to large bodies of data through the auspices of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital NLP Challenge, the i2b2 shared tasks (www.i2b2.org), and the new TREC Electronic Medical Records track as well as gold standard data being generated under US-funded Strategic Health Advanced Research Projects Area 4 (www.sharpn.org). Meanwhile, the number of abstracts in PubMed continues to grow exponentially. These are exciting times for biomedical NLP.

The Biomedical NLP Workshop at RANLP 2011 will provide a venue for presentation of current work in this field. Submissions in the areas of medicine and biology are both welcome, as is research on the genres of publications, clinical documents, and web-based materials.

Important dates:

Submission deadline: 25 June 2011
Notification of acceptance: 25 July 2011
Camera-ready copy due from authors: 22 August 2011
Workshop: 15 or 16 September, 2011

Submission instructions:

We invite regular papers 8 pages (excluding references) as well as demo papers and project notes 4 pages (excluding references). Submissions will be maintained by the START system. The authors should use the templates at http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2011/submissions.php and follow the guidelines there. All articles, accepted for presentation, will appear in the Workshop Proceedings and will be uploaded at the ACL Anthology.

Review and multiple submission policy

All submissions should be anonymous. Submissions will be reviewed by three members of the program committee.

The workshop calls for papers describing original research. Multiple submission is not permitted. If your paper is under review at any other venue, it will be rejected from the workshop without review.

Organizing committee:

Guergana Savova (Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School)
Kevin Bretonnel Cohen (University of Colorado School of Medicine)
Galia Angelova (IICT Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)

Program Committee: to be announced

Workshop venue:

The workshop is being held in conjunction with RANLP 2011 in Hissarya, Bulgaria. See the RANLP 2011 web site at http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2011 for further details.

Contact us at: biomedNLP2011 [at] lml [dot] bas [dot] bg