2011Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed

MEMBERSHIP

SIGBIOMED is ACL's special interest group for Biomedical Natural Language Processing. Membership currently stands at 93, up from 84 last year and 39 the year before.

ORGANIZATION

SIGBIOMED held its first elections in the fall of 2009 and is due to hold elections again next fall, per the SIG constitution.

WORKSHOP

The SIG's major activity has been the organization of the annual workshop. BioNLP 2011 will be held in conjunction with the ACL meeting in Portland. According to the preregistration statistics, it will be the second-largest workshop, second only to CoNLL. This will be the third BioNLP workshop under the auspices of SIGBIOMED and the tenth BioNLP workshop held in conjunction with ACL or NAACL. The workshop received 31 submissions this year and accepted eleven as papers and fourteen as posters.

FINANCES

We received $1,000 in contributions this year. As was the case last year, we are attempting to resolve discrepancies in the report from the Treasurer.

WEBSITE AND MAILING LIST

We have a working website (www.sigbiomed.org) that lists upcoming events of interest to our memebers and links to BioNLP proceedings. The website and the SIG mailing list were used for holding the election in 2009 and will be used for the same purpose in 2012. We use the BioNLP and AMIA nlp-sig mailing lists for announcements and discussions.