Call for papers

The Ninth InternationalWorkshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers interested in automated processing of health documents. Health documents encompass electronic health records, clinical guidelines, spontaneous reports for pharmacovigilance, biomedical literature, health forums/blogs or any other type of health-related documents. The LOUHI workshop series fosters interactions between the Computational Linguistics, Medical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence communities. It started in 2008 in Turku, Finland and has been organized 8 times: LOUHI 2010 was co-located with NAACL in Los Angeles, CA; LOUHI 2011 was co-located with Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) in Bled, Slovenia; LOUHI 2013 was held in Sydney, Australia during NICTA Techfest; LOUHI 2014 was co-located with EACL in Gothenburg, Sweden; LOUHI 2015 was co-located with EMNLP in Lisbon, Portugal; LOUHI 2016 was co-located with EMNLP in Austin, Texas; and LOUHI 2017 was held in Sydney, Australia.

LOUHI 2018 is soliciting papers describing original research. Papers must describe substantial and completed work but could also focus on a contribution, a negative result, a software package or work in progress. The topics include, but are not limited to, the following language processing techniques and related areas:

• Techniques supporting information extraction, e.g. named entity recognition, negation and uncertainty detection
• Classification and text mining applications (e.g. diagnostic classifications such as ICD-10 and nursing intensity scores) and problems (e.g. handling of unbalanced data sets)
• Text representation, including dealing with data sparsity and dimensionality issues
• Domain adaptation, e.g. adaptation of standard NLP tools (incl. tokenizers, PoS-taggers, etc) to the medical domain
• Information fusion, i.e. integrating data from various sources, e.g. structured and narrative documentation
• Unsupervised methods, including distributional semantics
• Evaluation, gold/reference standard construction and annotation
• Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of health documents
• Anonymization / de-identification of health records and ethics
• Supporting the development of medical terminologies and ontologies
• Individualization of content, consumer health vocabularies, summarization and simplification of text
• NLP for supporting documentation and decision making practices
• Predictive modeling of adverse events, e.g. adverse drug events and hospital acquired infections

We welcome submissions on topics related to text mining of health documents, particularly emphasizing multidisciplinary aspects of health documentation and the interplay between nursing and medical sciences, information systems, computational linguistics and computer science. We also encourage submissions reporting work on low-resourced languages, addressing the challenges of data sparsity and language characteristic diversity.

Submissions go through a double-blind review process, where each submission is reviewed by three program committee members. Accepted papers will be presented by the authors in a regular workshop session either as a talk or a poster. All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Accepted papers will be invited for publication in Journal of biomedical semantics, after passing a second post-workshop review for the journal. According to past experiences, full papers / long papers tend to be mature enough for a short review period, whereas short papers would have to be extended to a proper full paper passing a full review.

The submissions should be in PDF format and anonymized for review. All submissions must be written in English and follow the EMNLP 2018 formatting requirements (available on the EMNLP 2018 website). We strongly advise the use of the Word or LaTeX template files provided by EMNLP 2018 (http://www.emnlp2018.org).

* Long paper submission: up to 8 pages of content, plus 2 pages for references; final versions of long papers: one additional page (so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account): up to 9 pages with unlimited pages for references

* Short paper submission: up to 4 pages of content, plus 2 pages for references; final version of short papers: up to 5 pages with unlimited pages for references

Louhi 2018 will only accept electronic submission via its START submission system (https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/louhi2018/).