SCOPE

CL4Health fills the gap among the different biomedical language processing workshops by providing a general venue for a broad spectrum of patient-oriented language processing research. The second workshop on patient-oriented language processing follows the successful inaugural CL4Health workshop (co-located with LREC-COLING 2024), which clearly demonstrated the need for a computational linguistics venue that focuses on language related to health of the public.

CL4Health is concerned with the resources, computational approaches, and behavioral and socio-economic aspects of the public interactions with digital resources in search of health-related information that satisfies their information needs and guides their actions. The workshop invites papers concerning all areas of language processing focused on patients' health and health-related issues concerning the public. The issues include, but are not limited to accessibility and trustworthiness of health information provided to the public; explainable and evidence-supported answers to consumer-health questions; accurate summarization of patients' health records at their health-literacy level; understanding patients' non-informational needs through their language, and accurate and accessible interpretations of biomedical research. The topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to the following:

- Health-related information needs and online behaviors of the public;
- Quality assurance and ethics considerations in language technologies and approaches applied to text and other modalities for public consumption;
- Summarization of data from electronic health records for patients;
- Detection of misinformation in consumer health-related resources and mitigation of potential harms;
- Consumer health question answering (Community Question Answering)(CQA);
- Biomedical text simplification/adaptation;
- Dialogue systems to support patients' interactions with clinicians, healthcare systems, and online resources;
- Linguistic resources, data and tools for language technologies focusing on consumer health;
- Infrastructures and pre-trained language models for consumer health;

SHARED TASK

Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization (PerAnsSumm) will be co-located with the workshop. In community / consumer health question answering, several aspects, such as question understanding and answer generation, have been studied for over a decade. A new and important question posed by this task is the different perspectives provided in the answers to questions posted to online forums. The responses to the questions offer different answer perspectives, e.g., personal experiences, factual information, and suggestions. Traditionally, the CQA answer summarization task has focused on a single best-voted answer as a reference summary. A single answer does not capture all the perspectives. Moreover, a structured presentation of the information in the form of perspective-specific summaries may be more useful for the end-users. To address these gaps, this challenge introduces a novel perspective-specific answer summarization task within a CQA setup. The task will use the Perspective-aware healthcare Answer SuMmarizAtion (PUMA) dataset, a corpus of medical question-answer pairs created by the task organizers. The PUMA dataset consists of 3,167 CQA threads with approximately 10K answers filtered from the Yahoo! L6 corpus. Each answer in PUMA is annotated with five perspective spans: ‘cause’, ‘suggestion’, ‘experience’, ‘question’, and ‘information’.


IMPORTANT DATES
(Tentative)

January 30, 2025 -Workshop Paper Due Date️:
March 1, 2025 - Notification of acceptance:
March 10, 2025 - Camera-ready papers due:
April 8, 2025 - Pre-recorded video due (hard deadline):
May 3 OR 4, 2025 - Workshop


SUBMISSIONS

Two types of submissions are invited:

- Full papers: should not exceed eight (8) pages of text, plus unlimited references. These are intended to be reports of original research.
- Short papers: may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Appropriate short paper topics include preliminary results, application notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc.

Electronic Submission: Submissions must be electronic and in PDF format, using the Softconf START conference management system. Submissions need to be anonymous. The submission site will be announced shortly.

Dual submission policy: papers may NOT be submitted to the workshop if they are or will be concurrently submitted to another meeting or publication.

MEETING

The workshop will be hybrid. Virtual attendees must be registered for the workshop to access the online environment.

Accepted papers will be presented as posters or oral presentations based on the reviewers’ recommendations.

ORGANIZERS

- Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine
- Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining and University of Manchester, UK
- Paul Thompson, National Centre for Text Mining and University of Manchester, UK
- Deepak Gupta, US National Library of Medicine