Workshop on Natural Language Processing in Biomedical Applications

    http://lithpc2.epfl.ch/NLPBA02/

    First Call for Papers

    Organized by the Working Group 8 of EFMI on Natural Language
Understanding

    Held in conjunction with the EFMI Special Topics Spring Conference

    University of Nicosia, Cyprus

    8-9 March 2002


Description

Scientific knowledge in medicine and in molecular biology is contained in
ever increasing collections of documents as well as scientific databases.
Processing of medical texts can rely on classifications and medical
vocabularies such as GALEN, UMLS, SNOMED and ICD, which have been used in
conjunction with NLP tools and techniques for various medical applications.
While, NLP techniques applied to the field of molecular biology concentrates
on semantic disambiguation. Indeed, it is a major problem for this field.
Due to the overwhelming number of both existing and newly-created concepts,
scientists cannot search such databases efficiently, as they are
intrinsically heterogeneous and dynamic.
Researchers in medicine and biology would therefore benefit from textual
tools to facilitate the discovery and identification of important and
relevant concepts.


Workshop organization

This workshop aims at concentrating at one place many of the best experts in
NLP for biomedical applications. The location is conveniently reached from
anywhere in Europe and is propitious for scientific debates. The audience is
expected not to be higher than 50  persons, inspiring direct face to face
communications. A joint publication of the invited papers and the best
presentations will be organized in an International journal in the best time
frame after the workshop.


Topics

The topics of the workshop include (but are not limited to):
-Use of existing scientific thesauri and databases as terminological
resources for sublanguage applications
-Thesaurus & ontology construction and maintenance from domain specific
texts
-Integration of scientific databases and linguistic resources
-Text mining and information retrieval
-Term extraction and disambiguation
-Comparative corpus linguistics
-semantic annotation and evaluation

Organizers

Robert Baud (WG-8 chair)
Medical Informatics Division
University Hospital of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

Patrick Ruch (WG-8 co-chair)
Medical Informatics Division - Department of Computer Science
University Hospital of Geneva - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,
Switzerland


Program Committee

Sophia Ananiadou (Salford University, UK)
Olivier Bodenreider (National Library of Medicine, USA)
Paul Buitelaar (DFKI, Germany)
Berry de Bruijn (NRC, Canada)
Werner Ceuster (LANDC, Belgium)
Arie Hasman (Maastricht University, Holland)
Judith Klavans (Columbia University, USA)
Pierre Zweigenbaum (DIAM-SIM/DSI, France)


Format of Submissions

Paper submissions should consist of full papers of 5 pages maximum (times,
11pt). Each submission should include a separate title page providing the
following information: the title, a short abstract, names and affiliations
of all the authors, the full address of the primary author, including email.
The authors are requested to submit an electronic version of their papers
(ps, pdf or doc). Electronic submissions should be sent to Patrick Ruch
(Patrick.Ruch@dim.hcuge.ch). The official language of the conference is
English.


Important Deadlines

Submission deadline: January 20, 2002
Acceptance notification: February 15, 2002
Final submission: March 1, 2002
Workshop date: March 8-9, 2002

For further details regarding travel, programme of events, etc. see
http://lithpc2.epfl.ch/NLPBA02/