BioNLP 2008
A workshop of ACL 2008
Columbus, OH
E-mail: BioNLP2008 arroba googlegroups.com

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Call for Papers

BioNLP 2008


An ACL 2008 Workshop
Columbus, OH June 19, 2008
Submissions due: March 21, 2008, 11:59 PM Eastern US

Continuing a successful series of BioNLP workshops at ACL 2002, ACL 2003, NAACL 2004, ACL 2005, NAACL 2006, and ACL 2007, and in accordance with the ACL BioNLP tradition of presenting work on a broad range of topics, we invite submissions on any topic of current interest in the field of Biomedical Natural Language Processing.

We especially encourage submissions on:

  • Entity identification and normalization for a broad range of semantic categories
  • Ontologies and knowledge bases in BioNLP
  • Extraction of complex relations
  • The economics of text mining and database curation
  • Resources and novel strategies for system testing and evaluation
  • Shared tasks in the biomedical domain
  • Test suites and corpora for BioNLP
  • Quantifying utility to end-users
  • Portability for non-developers
  • Summarization
  • Question-answering
  • Full text and figures

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: Friday, March 21, 2008
Notification of acceptance: Sunday, April 20, 2008
Camera-ready copy due from authors: Saturday, April 26, 2008
Workshop: June 19, 2008

Submission instructions:

Two types of submissions are invited: full papers and poster abstracts. Submissions are due by 11:59 PM EST on March 21, 2008. Submit your paper or abstract via the ACL BioNLP 2008 site at https://www.softconf.com/acl08/ACL08-WS05/.

Full papers should not exceed eight (8) pages of text and one page of references. These are intended to be reports of original research. BioNLP aims to be the forum for interesting, innovative, and promising work involving biomedicine and language technology, whether or not yielding high performance at the moment. This by no means precludes our interest in and preference for mature results, strong performance, and thorough evaluation. Both types of research and combinations of thereof are encouraged.

Poster abstracts should not exceed two (2) pages. Accepted abstracts will be published in a separate section of the workshop proceedings. Appropriate poster topics include preliminary results, application notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc.

Submissions must be electronic and in PDF format, and should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings. Ensure that you are *not* in A4 format. Please see the conference website for detailed typesetting specifications. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available on the ACL meeting website (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html). Submissions need not be anonymous. Authors who cannot submit a PDF file electronically should contact the workshop organizers well in advance of the submission deadline.

Dual submission policy: note that papers may not be submitted to the BioNLP 2008 workshop if they are or will be concurrently submitted to another meeting or publication and that other meeting or publication prohibits dual submissions. If your paper is also submitted to ISMB, you should expect it to be rejected by ISMB. If your paper is or will be concurrently under consideration by another meeting or publication, notify us of that fact in a footnote on the first page. Do not dual-submit your BioNLP 2008 workshop paper to ISMB.

Authors are invited to submit expanded versions of their papers to a special issue to BMC Bioinformatics. Such papers will go through the normal BMC review process.

Note: BMC Bioinformatics is an open access journal. As such, submissions to a special issue bear a publication cost of £600 per paper regardless of the authors' institutional membership in BMC. Submission to the special issue is entirely voluntary. In order to get the special issue out in a timely fashion, we simply ask authors of accepted papers to notify us if they plan to submit an expanded version of their paper for the special issue.

  • Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine
  • Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining and University of Manchester, UK
  • Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, The MITRE Corporation and University of Colorado School of Medicine
  • John Pestian, Computational Medicine Center, Cincinnati Children.s Hospital and Medical Center
  • Jun-ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Japan and University of Manchester, UK
  • Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh, UK




This document last modified Thursday, 20-Mar-2008 16:49:31 MDT.