2018Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed

MEMBERSHIP

The SIG membership remains stable, at 104 members.

WORKSHOP

As in previous years, the SIG’s main public face was the BioNLP workshop, co-located with an ACL event continuously since 2005.

ISSUES OF NOTICE

The main happening in the SIGBIOMED world this year was that the major mailing list and web site that serve the biomedical natural language processing community went down, accompanied by the unfortunate illness of the person who had maintained both of them for many years. The SIGBIOMED chair and secretary worked with other members of the larger biomedical processing community to come up with solutions to both the mailing list problem and the web site problem. The process and the outcome are described in the following email, which will be widely distributed by Wednesday of the ACL annual meeting. We note that although this was done by officers of SIGBIOMED, the resulting mailing list and web site are independent of SIGBIOMED; we report it here because it is relevant to the community in which most SIGBIOMED members work.

We are happy to announce a new mailing list and web site for the biomedical natural language processing list.

After many years of promoting communication about biomedical natural language processing, the BioNLP.org web site and mailing list require updating and, indeed, replacement. This replacement has required a change of website name and a new platform for managing the mailing list. After some months of research and discussion, the following have been created:

The BioNLP.info web site[1] (actually a blog) has been created and welcomes posts about topics of interest to the community. Please send submissions to kevin.cohen@gmail.com or to ddemner@mail.nih.gov. Submissions will be briefly screened for appropriate content and posted. Currently the site has pages that describe the BioNLP conference ecosystem and that define (one conception of) what our field is about. Volunteers to put together (and maintain ad infinitum!) pages on resources, upcoming conferences, etc. would be much appreciated.

The bionlpinfo.googlegroups.com mailing list replaces the bionlp.org mailing list. We hope that it will function just like the bionlp.org mailing list. Due to the circumstances that required replacement of the bionlp.org web site and mailing list, we have not been able to import the old mailing list. So, if you would like to be on it, we encourage you to go to the Google Groups page at xxx and sign up for it. Please also distribute information about the new mailing list to anyone who you think might be interested--the old list had hundreds of subscribers, and we doubt that we will be able to reach all of them.

We would be remiss to announce these replacements for the old web site and mailing list without thanking Bob Futrelle for the many years of work that he put into founding and maintaining them. It is the many conversations that we have had with our colleagues via the bionlp.org mailing list that convinced us that putting in the hours of work that have gone into this relaunching would be worth the time that it took. Regarding the process that went into this: the executive committee of the SIGBIOMED special interest group met via phone or email with each other and with Bob to discuss a variety of options for either reviving the old web site and list, or replacing them. After reaching a consensus within this group, we reached out to other members of the biomedical natural language processing community to solicit their input. We recognize that having to sign up for a new list is not optimal, but this was the best of many alternatives that we researched. In order to avoid a repeat of the circumstances that made this reconception necessary, we have ensured that multiple people have “owner” permissions both on the web site and on the mailing list.