2024Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed
MEMBERSHIP
SIGBIOMED is ACL's special interest group for Biomedical Natural Language Processing. Membership currently stands at 229, slightly up from last year.
ORGANIZATION
The term of the elected officers started in September, 2022 and is to end in 2025. The new elections are due in July 2025 and the nominations of the candidates in June 2025.
Following the rules of the SIG constitution, we assembled a group of members in good standing to amend the constitution. The amendment was prompted by retirement of Kevin Cohen, one of the founding members and the first Chair, and recently Secretary of the SIG. We realized we had no provisions for an emergency like a sudden departure of the officers. We have established a vice-chair position and a procedure for emergency elections. The amendment was ratifies by the members and approved by ACL.
ACTIVITIES
As in previous years, the SIG’s main public event was the BioNLP workshop, co-located with ACL events continuously since 2002. In 2023 it was associated with ACL. The workshop ran in hybrid mode and was very well attended both in-person and online. The same is planned for 2024. We have a confirmed Keynote presenter, Shared Tasks overviews and large poster sessions.
We held the first CL4Health workshop associated with LREC-COLING 2024. The workshop featured four keynote presentations and attracted a diverse group of participants, many of whom are newcomers to biomedical language processing. The workshop ran in hybrid mode and was attended by over 100 participants, primarily in-person.
We plan proposing BioNLP25 to be held in conjunction with ACL and CL4Health 2026.
FUNDS
None received
WEBSITE and MAILING LIST
We have a working web site that lists upcoming events of interest to our members and links to BioNLP proceedings.
We use the following mailing lists for announcements and discussions:
https://groups.google.com/g/bionlpinfo/members (current SIG list) https://groups.google.com/g/sigbiomed (legacy SIG list)
https://amia.org/community/working-groups/natural-language-processing