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Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 16:44:34 EST From: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu> To: rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu Subject: ACL-02 Workshop CFP: NLP in the Biomedical Domain ACL-02 (http://www.acl02.org) Workshop Natural Language Processing in the Biomedical Domain July 11 - 12 University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA Sponsored by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), Special Interest Group on Natural Language Processing (NLP-SIG). Workshop Description The aim of this workshop is to focus on challenges in processing biomedical language and to present results in developing techniques for this domain. Biomedicine comprises biological sciences, clinical medicine, public health and education. This domain presents many opportunities for NLP technologies such as information extraction from biomedical texts, document and answer retrieval from large, unstructured text collections (such as the biomedical literature and the World Wide Web), and interaction with users through natural language. Until recently, the level of collaboration between core computational linguistics researchers and the biomedical informatics community has been limited. The purpose of this workshop is to take active steps towards bridging that gap. Indeed, this would be the first workshop under the auspices of the ACL entirely devoted to biomedical language processing. The biomedical informatics community conducts basic research on natural language processing, but has a strong focus on practical applications, large-scale systems, and rigorous evaluation to show real-world impact. They have helped develop a number of large, complex resources for biomedical terminology, such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), International Classification of Disease (ICD), Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED), Human Genome Organization Gene Nomenclature (HUGO), and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). There is also substantial experience with large corpora, deployed system prototypes and statistical techniques. The computational linguistics community can benefit from these experiences and resources, while contributing recent technologies and methodologies. The biomedical domain presents many exciting challenges for collaboration between both communities. We envision the outcome of this workshop to consist of concrete steps towards establishing links between research groups from both camps for future interactions. We invite submissions including but not limited to the following areas: - Information extraction - Information retrieval - Natural language interfaces - Text mining - Text summarization - Speech recognition - Integration of system components - Lexicon and terminology acquisition - Characterization of biomedical language - Evaluation of biomedical applications Format for Submission Authors are requested to submit one electronic version of their papers OR four hardcopies. Please submit hardcopies only if electronic submission is impossible. Maximum length is 8 pages including figures and references. Please conform to the traditional two-column ACL Proceedings format. Style files can be downloaded from http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/acl02/style/ Email submissions should be sent to: sbj2@columbia.edu Hard copy submissions should be sent to: Stephen Johnson Department of Medical Informatics Columbia University 622 West 168th Street New York, NY 10032 Timetable Paper Submission Deadline Mar 15 Acceptance Notification Apr 19 Final Version Deadline May 17 Organizers Stephen Johnson (Columbia University), chair AMIA NLP-SIG Udo Hahn (Freiburg University, Germany) Judith Klavans (Columbia University) Program Committee Robert Baud (University Hospital of Geneva) Tom Rindflesch (National Library of Medicine) Robert Futrelle (Northeastern University) Nina Wachholder (Rutgers University) Tsujii Junichi (University of Tokyo) Carol Friedman (Columbia University) Donia Scott (University of Brighton) Lynette Hirschman (MITRE Corporation) Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh) Pierre Zweigenbaum (University Pierre and Marie Curie)