2014Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed

MEMBERSHIP

SIGBIOMED is ACL's special interest group for Biomedical Natural Language Processing. Membership continues to grow and currently stands at 104, same as last year, which was up from 93 the previous year and 84 the year before.

ORGANIZATION

Per the SIG constitution, the second elections since the SIG's formation were held in 2013. Kevin Cohen and Dina Demner-Fushman were re-elected as chair and secretary. The issues that came up in the election have been resolved---please see below for more on this.

WORKSHOP

The SIG's major activity has been the organization of the annual workshop. The 2013 workshop was the fifth BioNLP workshop under the auspices of SIGBIOMED and the twelfth BioNLP workshop held in conjunction with ACL or NAACL. There were about 40 participants.

This year's workshop will be two days long, with research papers on the first day and a featured talk, a panel on shared tasks, and two short tutorials the second day.

FINANCES

In addition to organizing the workshop, our other main activity has been in fundraising. Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center has generously agreed to provide partial funding for publication of the workshop proceedings in a biomedical journal, which is important to our community, since many of us are employed in medical schools, which prefer journal publications over conference proceedings.

WEBSITE AND MAILING LIST

We have a working website ([1]|here) that lists upcoming events of interest to our members and links to BioNLP proceedings. We use the BioNLP and AMIA nlp-sig mailing lists for announcements and discussions.

ISSUES OF NOTICE

The SIG constitution was modified this year to clarify various issues, primarily relating to elections of SIG officers and conflicts of interest.