Introduction

In the past few decades, growing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) systems have made massive clinical narrative data available electronically. Natural language processing (NLP) technologies that can unlock information from narrative text have received great attention in the medical domain. Many clinical NLP methods and systems have been developed and showed promising results in various information extraction tasks. These methods and tools have also been successfully applied to facilitate clinical research, as well as to support healthcare applications. At the same time, the availability and use of health information online has exploded through use of social media, question-answering and community discussion forums, and health-related websites. These present additional challenges and opportunities for further development of new methodologies and healthcare applications.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a unique platform to bring together researchers and practitioners in healthcare informatics working with health-related free text, and facilitate close interaction among students, scholars, and industry professionals on health NLP challenges worldwide. This is a one-day workshop that consists of invited speakers, podium talks, and poster presentations. The workshop will be held on August 9th, 2021, virtually at Victoria, Canada, in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2021). Due to the uncertainty of current pandemics, we are going virtual with the workshop.

We invite papers and short abstracts on novel approaches, works in progress, comparative analyses of tools, and original state-of-the-art work in health NLP methods, tools, and applications. Selected papers will be presented as podium talks, and other interesting submissions and abstracts will be showcased as poster presentations.

Audience

Target audience includes both health NLP researchers and consumers. Anyone interested in NLP-based approaches, solutions, and applications in clinical, biomedical, and consumer health informatics is welcome. Researchers and students working on health NLP projects and others interested in learning about and sharing NLP knowledge and resources are strongly encouraged to attend. We also welcome students who wish to closely interact with NLP experts. Potential attendees may come from NLP communities in the medical domain (e.g., AMIA NLP Working Group, BioNLP) and computer and information scientists and linguists working on health-related text processing (e.g., with interests in ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, TREC Precision Medicine and Clinical Decision Support tracks, etc.), as well as general health informatics professionals and researchers.

Organizers

Chairs:

• Rui Zhang, PhD, Associate Professor, Institute for Health Informatics & College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, US.
• Hua Xu, PhD, Professor, School of Biomedical Informatics, Univeristy of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, US.

Publication Chair:

• Yifan Peng, PhD, Assistant Professor, Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine, NY, US.

Steering committee:

• Dina Demner Fushman, MD, PhD, Scientist, Lister Hill Center, National Library of Medicine, US
• Wendy Chapman, PhD, Professor and Director, Centre for Digital Transformation of Health, The University of Melbourne, Australia
• Buzhou Tang, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China
• Ozlem Uzuner, PhD, Associate Professor, Information Sciences and Technology, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, US
• Karin Verspoor, PhD, Dean, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
• Hongfang Liu, Professor, Biomedical Informatics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, US
• Stephane Meystre, MD, PhD, Chair and Founding Director, Translational Biomedical Informatics Center, Associate Professor, Psychiatry Department and Biomedical Informatics Center, Medical University of South Carolina, US

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to yip4002@med.cornell.edu