AMIA 2019 NLP Working Group Pre-Symposium:

Graduate Student Consortium, Community Challenges/Workshops, and System Demos 

Nov 16, 2019

Washington, DC 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for clinical and biomedical narratives has received growing attention over the past decade. As these efforts grew, so has the need for broader community engagement and resource sharing. As a result, many NLP-ready data sources and software have been developed and shared. These efforts have provided significant learning opportunities for new comers to the field and have supported advancement of the state of the art. In its support of these goals, the AMIA NLP working group pre-symposium continues the tradition since its inception in 2012 to provide a unique platform for close interactions among students, scholars, and industry professionals who are interested in clinical NLP for data and resource sharing. This year’s event will consist of three sections: 1) a graduate student consortium, where students can present their work and get feedback from faculty; 2) a NLP community challenges and workshops session, that will invite organizers and participants of NLP shared task challenges and workshops in the clinical and biomedical domain to present the major lessons learned from the most recent shared tasks and workshops, highlighting the newly available corpora for NLP research as well as the state of the art solutions to various NLP tasks; and 3) System demos session, where researchers will demo their existing systems and disseminate their software.  In addition, we will include a (4) late breaking news session for new and significant research findings.

Program

The pre-symposium will include three sessions: (1) The graduate student consortium. (2) Community Challenges, Workshops, and the State of the Art. (3) System demonstrations. In addition, we welcome (4) Late Breaking News on significant research findings.

Graduate students consortium:

Consortium is open to both PhD and Masters students. The purpose of the graduate student consortium is to provide opportunities for direct interactions between students and researchers in the biomedical and clinical NLP fields, so that students can 1) refine their research focus; 2) discuss specific questions about study design, algorithm development, or evaluation plan; 3) receive constructive feedback and suggestions about their dissertation work; and 4) establish possible collaborations.

We invite advanced graduate students to submit abstracts for a podium presentation of their graduate research work (in the biomedical and clinical NLP fields) to this session.  Abstracts should explain the problem, and its challenges, as well as the novelty and significance of the work. Following peer review, accepted papers will be presented in plenary forums and assessed for:

• Presentation (slides, speech clarity and rhythm)
• Significance (real problem, real people, and potential impact)
• Innovation (new or improved, in one field or broader)
• Approach (appropriate research design, methods used, and feasibility)
• Environment (adequate resources, supervisors/collaborators, guidance)

Community Challenges, Workshops, and the State of the Art:

The history of text mining and NLP in the general domain shows that community challenges based on carefully curated resources, such as those organized in the MUC, TREC, and ACE events, have significantly contributed to the progress of their respective fields. In the last decade, we have observed an increasing number of NLP challenges organized in the biomedical and clinical domains. Along with shared task challenges, the numbers of organized clinical and biomedical NLP conferences are on the rise, providing more diverse venues for medical informatics professionals to disseminate their work.  For this session, we invite proposals from shared tasks organized since November 2018.  Please submit a 1-2 page proposal describing the task and high level findings.  Following peer-review, we will invite speakers to present the most recent advances in their shared tasks to  the community.  

System Demonstrations:

We invite demonstrations of systems to be presented to the audience.  Demonstrations are intended to be live. They will be chosen from a proposal submitted by the community and will be prioritized based on novelty and general applicability to the community through peer review.  Please submit your proposal through the link below.

Late Breaking News:

As a last session, we invite late breaking NLP news on research advancements of significance  or information about upcoming resources to be presented to the audience.  Please submit a two page proposal of late breaking news for peer review through the link below.

Program Committee

• Özlem Uzuner (chair), PhD, FACMI, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
• Meliha Yetişgen (vice chair), PhD, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 
• Hongfang Liu (past chair), PhD, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN
• Stephane Meystre, MD, PhD, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC
• Guergana Savova, PhD, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
• Chunhua Weng, PhD, Columbia University, New York, NY
• Hua Xu, PhD, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX
• Dina Demner-Fushman, PhD, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD
• Pierre Zweigenbaum, PhD, LIMSI, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France
• Kavishwar Wagholikar MBBS, PhD, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 
• Jon Patrick, PhD, Health Language Analytics, Sydney, Australia

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: August 16, 2019
• Notification of Acceptance:  October 1, 2019
• Workshop: November 15, 2019

Submission Guidelines

All submissions have a page limit of 2 pages using AMIA Template 

Graduate Student Consortium: Graduate students are invited to submit applications for a podium presentation of their graduate research work (in the biomedical and clinical NLP fields). The submission is suggested to include the following sections:

• Aims and Objectives - State the main objective(s) of your project.
• Justification for the Research Topic - Explain the motivations for your project. 
• Research Questions - Stating your research question is essential. This might be done in a list.
• Research Methodology - If you already have plans for your research methodology, explain them here. If you have not found an appropriate methodology yet, or wonder which one to choose, this is also the place to mention it. In this case, list the requirements your methodology should fulfill.
• Research Results to Date - You are not required to have results. But if you already have some, present them here.
• References – Any relevant citation.

Community Challenges, Workshops: The organizers and participants of NLP shared tasks in the biomedical domain to present the design, implementation, and results of these events. The session aims to provide a forum for the biomedical NLP community to be informed about the-state-of-the art approaches for the topics covered by the shared tasks.The organizers and participants of biomedical NLP shared tasks are encouraged to have their systems available for audiences to gain hands-on experience of using the systems. The following sections are suggested:

• Shared Task/Workshop Description - Provide a description of the shared task/workshop.
• Summary/Outcome of the Shared Task/Workshop or system - The organizers can provide a summary of the shared task/workshop and the participants can provide an overview of their systems.
• References.

System Demonstrations: All researchers in the biomedical and clinical NLP are invited to submit their systems for live demo. The submission is suggested to include the following sections:

• Overview of system – It can be an abstract or system overview.
• Justification of the Inclusion – Explain the relevance, interest, and value of the system to NLP-WG and its impact on informatics/medicine/biology.

Late Breaking News: All researchers in the biomedical and clinical NLP are invited to submit their recent, significant research news. The submission is suggested to include the following sections:

• Overview of developments
• Justification of the Inclusion – Explain the relevance, interest, and value of the system to NLP-WG and its impact on informatics/medicine/biology.

Submission Method

https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=amia2019nlpworkinggr

Questions and Comments

For questions please contact Özlem Uzuner or Meliha Yetişgen.