UPDATE: Submission deadline extended to Sunday March 10, 2019
Call for Papers
Clinical text is growing rapidly as electronic health records become pervasive. Much of the information recorded in a clinical encounter is located exclusively in provider narrative notes, which makes them indispensable for supplementing structured clinical data in order to better understand patient state and care provided. The methods and tools developed for the clinical domain have historically lagged behind the scientific advances in the general-domain NLP. Despite the substantial recent strides in clinical NLP, a substantial gap remains. The goal of this workshop is to address this gap by establishing a regular event in CL conferences that brings together researchers interested in developing state-of-the-art methods for the clinical domain. The focus is on on improving NLP technology to enable clinical applications, and specifically, information extraction and modeling of narrative provider notes from electronic health records, patient encounter transcripts, and other clinical narratives.
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 work that specifically focuses on advancing the state-of-the-art in clinical NLP, rather than merely applies 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 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 and other handling of protected health information
- 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 methodology for clinical data
- Evaluation techniques for the clinical domain
Submissions
Submissions should follow the NAACL-HLT 2019 style guidelines. Long paper submissions must follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages of content. Short paper submissions must also follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings, and must not exceed four (4) pages. References do not count against these limits. We strongly recommend the use of the official NAACL-HLT 2019 style templates:
All submissions must be in PDF format. Submissions that do not adhere to the above author guidelines or ACL policies will be rejected without review. Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management for both long and short papers.
Important Dates
Submissions due (both short and long): Wednesday, March 6, 2019
Notification of acceptance: Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Camera-ready papers due: Friday, April 5, 2019
Workshop: Thursday or Friday, June 6 or 7, 2019
Workshop Organizers
- Anna Rumshisky (UMass Lowell)
- Kirk Roberts (University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston)
- Steven Bethard (University of Arizona)
- Tristan Naumann (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Program Committee
- Jenna Wiens (University of Michigan)
- Lynette Hirschman (The MITRE Corporation)
- Dmitriy Dligach (Loyola University)
- Martha Palmer (UC Boulder)
- Sabine Bergler (Concordia University)
- Timothy Miller (Boston Children’s Hospital)
- Ben Wellner (The MITRE Corporation)
- Sumithra Velupillai (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
- Stephane Meystre (University of Utah School of Medicine)
- Sadid Hasan (Philips North America)
- Byron Wallace (Northeastern University)
- Yoshinobu Kano (Zhizuoka University)