NLP Approaches for Unmet Information Needs in Health Care
(http://www.uwm.edu/~hongyu/files/BIBM.workshop.html)

A workshop of IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and
Biomedicine 2009, Washington DC

As the amount of literature and other information in the biomedical
field continues to grow at a rapid rate, researchers in the health
care community dependent on computers to find the best answers for
meeting their information needs. Traditionally, information needs have
been simply represented as a set of queries. Recently, there have been
growing research efforts addressing these needs with natural language
approaches. Although great strides have been made in producing
valuable biomedical databases, more work needs to be done to develop
computational approaches that enable users to search multiple
databases, which often comprise a variety of formats, including
journal articles, clinical guidelines, and electronic health care
records. Therefore, the task at hand is to develop natural language
systems that can understand the queries or complex questions being
asked, interpret the different resources that could be used to answer
the question, extract relevant information, and summarize this
information to meet user needs, and data mine the structured data for
clinical decision support. This workshop will explore a broad range of
traditional NLP approaches and emerging new methods, and the variety
of challenges that need to be overcome with respect to these issues.

Some specific topics include:

* Clinical information needs
* Clinical terminology and coding clinical data
* Annotation and machine learning
* Healthcare, domain-specific adaption of open-domain NLP techniques
* Information extraction from electronic health records
* Data mining of electronic health records
* NLP approaches that involve with image and video
* Automatic speech recognition for the healthcare domain
* Spoken clinical question answering


Paper submission: http://kis-lab.com/cyberchair/bibm09/cbc_index.html
Timeline:
August 10, 2009: Due date for full workshop papers submission
September 10, 2009: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
September 17, 2009: Camera-ready of accepted papers
November 1-4, 2009: Workshops

Organizers:

Workshop co-chairs:

Hong Yu, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, PhD, International Computer Science Institute
John Ely, MD University of Iowa
Lyle Ungar, PhD, University of Pennsylvania

Workshop PC members:

Eugene Agichtein, Emory University
Alan Aronson, NLM
James Cimino, NIH
Kevin Cohen, University of Colorado
Nigel Collier, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Chris Chute, Mayo Clinic
Dina Demner Fushman, NLM
Bob Futrelle, Northeastern University
Henk Harkema, University of Pittsburgh
Lynette Hirschman, MITRE
Susan McRoy, University of Wisconsin
Serguei Pakhomov, University of Minnesota
Tim Patrick, University of Wisconsin
Thomas Rindflesch, NLM
Pete White, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
John Wilbur, NLM
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI