LINGUIST List 14.319

Fri Jan 31 2003

Calls: NLP/Artificial Intelligence

Editor for this issue: Karolina Owczarzak <karolinalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. S.Ananiadou, Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine, Japan
2. Dr. Bhanu Prasad, Artificial Intelligence, India

Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine

A workshop to be held in conjunction with the 41st annual meeting of
the Association for Computational Linguistics.

http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ACL03/bionlp.htm

Workshop description

The vast amount of knowledge found in existing scientific literature
is a challenge for the scientist working in rapidly growing areas such
as molecular biology and biomedicine. Medline contains over 10
million abstracts, and approximately 40,000 new abstracts are added
each month. Although there are growing numbers of sequence databases
and other hand-constructed databases, most new information is
unstructured text in Medline and full text journals. The ability to
have access to natural language techniques and tools that automate and
facilitate the process of knowledge discovery consistently is of
paramount importance.

In the past couple of years, the need for the two fields of
biomedicine and natural language processing to exchange ideas has been
demonstrated in the emergence of special interest groups and dedicated
workshops and tutorials. The needs of biomedicine are practical and
NLP techniques are mature enough to respond to those needs. For NLP
researchers, processing biomedical texts is a challenge especially in
the area of terminology, information extraction from texts, knowledge
discovery or ontology building from large collection of documents,
sharing knowledge in the form of factual and textual data bases,
annotation tools and techniques. For biologists, it is now not
uncommon to study protein complexes and pathways composed of dozens of
dynamically interacting proteins. With the recent advent of high
sensitivity methods to rapidly identify components of multi-protein
complexes, the extent of this complexity is likely to grow
exponentially in the next few years. At the same time, researchers in
biomedicine have already constructed large scale linguistic resources
such as UMLS, SNOMED, Mesh, Gene Ontology, etc., which can be used for
knowledge-based NLP, Intelligent IR, knowledge-triggered discovery of
new scientific knowledge, etc.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together NLP researchers in
biomedicine and to discuss recent advances in the computational
analysis of text, which go beyond traditional keyword-based indexing
methods and begin to offer content-based analysis. Past experience
has shown that sharing of common resources, not only domain specific
dictionaries and thesauri but also properly annotated common
test/training corpora play a significant role in the systematic
development of NLP techniques in a specific domain. Processing a
sublanguage like biomedicine requires the systematic construction of
such common resources and the use of different NLP techniques. What is
lacking in this area is standardisation of terminological resources,
agreement on the annotation standards, evaluation metrics and
initiatives similar to TREC, MUC for the biomedical domain. For these
purposes interaction between the two research fields is crucial.

Areas of interest
In this workshop, we will address the following issues:

* Information Extraction 
* Text mining
* Term recognition
* Knowledge management systems
* Creation of specialised datasets and databases of bio-entities and 
relations between bio-entities
* Construction of pathways
* Analysis of gene array data using computational linguistic techniques
* Integration of resources 
* Annotation tools and techniques
* Ontology construction
* Evaluation of biomedical applications 

Intended audience
 
 This workshop follows up workshops with similar objectives such as
NLP and Ontology Building (Tokyo, 2001), ISMB (2001, 2002), ACL
(2002). The organisers hope to create SIGs in areas of common interest
such as acronym detection in molecular biology, annotation standards
in biology, evaluation techniques. The organisers plan to have a
separate session for co-operation and sharing in resource building and
formulating challenge problems. Expected number of participants: 45


Submission format
 
Please submit full papers of maximum 8 pages (including references,
figures etc). Authors should follow the main conference ACL style
format. Please email your submissions to Sophia Ananiadou
(S.Ananiadousalford.ac.uk).

Important Dates

* Submission deadline for workshop papers: 22 March 2003
* Notification of accepted papers: 19 April 2003
* Deadline for camera ready copies: 17 May 2003
* Workshop date: 11 July 2003


Organisers

* Sophia Ananiadou (University of Salford, UK)
* Udo Hahn (University of Freiburg, Germany)
* Jerry Hobbs (USC/ISI, USA)
* James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, USA)
* Junichi Tsujii (University of Tokyo, Japan)
 

Program Committee Members

Carol Friedman (CUNY / Columbia University, USA)
Robert Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield, UK)
Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Goran Nenadic (UMIST, UK)
Kousaku Okubo (Kyushu University, Japan)
Christos Ouzounis (EMBL- UK)
Irena Spasic (University of Salford, UK)
Toshihisa Takagi (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Alfonso Valencia (Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia, Spain)
Limsoon Wong (Institute for Infocom Research, Singapore)
Pierre Zweigenbaum (Universite Paris 6, France)

The 1st Indian International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(IICAI-03) will be held in Hyderabad, INDIA during December 18-20
2003. 

This conference focuses on all areas of AI and related topics. 

We are inviting paper submissions and sessions proposals. 

Please visit the website: 

http://www.iiconference.org 

for more information on this event.

Regards

B.Prasad
Conference Chair
Email: bhanucanes.gsw.edu
Web: http://www.gsw.edu/~bhanu