AAAI 2012 Fall Symposium on

Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery
in Biomedical Text

November 2-4, 2012
Arlington, VA, USA

The amount of biological and medical literature has grown exponentially within the last decade. This data may be in the form of journal citations in PubMed, in the form of clinical summaries in healthcare institutions or in the form of blogs and user comments that express personal opinions on the different healthcare topics such as drug adverse effects or disease treatments. This material, be it expressed by researchers, medical professionals or medical care receivers, is of significant importance in terms of the wealth of information that it possesses. However it is only valuable if efficient and reliable ways of accessing and analyzing that information are available.

In this symposium we would like to address the current research on computational techniques for information retrieval and knowledge discovery from biomedical and clinical texts, with a focus on machine learning and/or natural language processing, as well as novel applications of existing techniques to the open problems in text processing in biomedical domain. We will invite several speakers from the biomedical text processing community who will present current research problems in this field, and we will invite contributed talks on novel learning approaches that can improve the analysis and retrieval of biological and medical information. 

We invite submissions that address novel or existing algorithmic and methodological contributions to the spectrum of problems in biomedical text analysis, where textual resources can include semi-structured and unstructured biomedical text, clinical text, social media and any other healthcare related text media. For researchers that wish to report on their existing work we welcome submissions that review key problems in the field, outline important reflections considering the current progress and provide guidance to the new researchers to the state of the art and the new methodologies as they become established.

Contacts
Rezarta Islamaj: rezarta.islamaj AT nih.gov
Lana Yeganova: lana.yeganova AT nih.gov