Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop at COLING 2016

Osaka, Japan. December 11, 2016.

Call for Papers

Clinical text offers unique challenges that differentiate it not only from open-domain data, but from other types of text in the biomedical domain as well. Notably, clinical text contains a significant number of abbreviations, medical terms, and other clinical jargon. Clinical narratives are characterized by non-standard document structures that are often critical to overall understanding. Narrative provider notes are designed to communicate with other experts while at the same time serving as a legal record. Finally, clinical notes contain sensitive patient- specific information that raise privacy and security concerns that present special challenges for natural language systems.

We invite high-quality original submissions that develop methods to address the above challenges to NLP in the clinical domain. We are interested in the work that specifically focuses on advancing state-of-the-art in clinical NLP, rather than merely applying existing NLP systems to downstream clinical problems (such as outcome prediction or clinical cohort selection). The submissions may include initial results from promising new methods that may spark interest from other members of the Clinical NLP community and lead to collaborative work. The following is a list of topics of interest for this workshop:

  • Modeling clinical text in standard NLP tasks (tagging, chunking, parsing, entity identification, relation extraction, coreference, summarization, etc.)
  • De-identification of protected health information (PHI), surrogate PHI generation
  • Structure of clinical documents (e.g., section identification)
  • Information extraction from clinical text
  • Integration of structured and textual data for clinical tasks
  • Domain adaptation techniques for clinical data
  • Medical terminologies and ontologies
  • Annotation schemes and annotation methodologies

Submissions

All submissions must be in PDF format and should follow COLING style guidelines. Submissions may have a maximum length of eight (8) pages for long papers and four (4) pages for short papers, with unlimited pages for references. Both long and short papers will undergo rigorous review. All submissions should be anonymized, and should not include authors' names or any other identifying information. Please submit using the following link: https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/ClinicalNLP.

Important Dates

September 25, 2016: Submissions due (GMT -12)
October 16, 2016: Author notification
October 30, 2016: Camera-ready papers due
December 11, 2016: Workshop

Workshop Organizers

  • Anna Rumshisky (UMass Lowell)
  • Kirk Roberts (University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston)
  • Steven Bethard (University of Alabama at Birmingham)
  • Tristan Naumann (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Program Committee

  • Sabine Bergler (Concordia University)
  • Kevin Cohen (University of Colorado School of Medicine)
  • Dina Demner-Fushman (National Library of Medicine)
  • Dmitriy Dligach (Loyola University)
  • Oladimeji Farri (Philips HealthCare)
  • Michele Filannino (SUNY Albany)
  • Nazli Goharian (Georgetown University)
  • Cyril Grouin (LIMSI-CNRS)
  • Sanda Harabagiu (University of Texas at Dallas)
  • Sadid Hasan (Philips HealthCare)
  • Lynette Hirschman (MITRE)
  • Guergana Savova (Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard University)
  • Hongfang Liu (Mayo Clinic)
  • Stephane Meystre (University of Utah School of Medicine)
  • Timothy Miller (Boston Children’s Hospital)
  • Marie-Francine Moens (KU Leuven)
  • Danielle Mowery (University of Utah School of Medicine)
  • Ted Pedersen (University of Minnesota, Duluth)
  • Amber Stubbs (Simmons College)
  • Sumithra Velupillai (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
  • Ben Wellner (MITRE)
  • Jenna Wiens (University of Michigan)
  • Stephen Wu (Oregon Health and Science University)
  • Hua Xu (University of Texas at Houston)
  • Pierre Zweigenbaum (French National Centre for Scientific Research)