9:00 - noon
Ontologies provide machine-interpretable semantic representations of biomedical information that can then be shared, queried, and reasoned about. Natural language processing techniques are increasingly being applied within the biomedical domain, allowing machines to automatically interpret and use the large amounts of unstructured textual data generated each day across the biomedical domain, including but not limited to that generated in the course of clinical care and research.
This workshop aims to explore and promote connections between work in ontologies and natural language processing techniques, with a focus on the domain of biomedicine. Work in both areas will benefit from this connection. For example, a significant hurdle in NLP, especially as applications increasingly require full natural language understanding, is the appropriate representation of the semantics of a particular word, phrase, sentence, or document. Ontologies encode useful domain and terminological knowledge and provide an ideal logical framework on which to build such semantic representations. Applications abound throughout biomedicine for these technologies, including in cohort identification, reporting, quality assurance, data integration, and clinical decision support. Similarly, NLP techniques can be useful for ontology creation, use, and evaluation, for instance in support of automated methods for generating and evaluating definitions for ontology terms. This workshop will provide a forum to discuss the state of the art in using NLP and ontologies together; disseminate research in these areas; enhance awareness of the problems faced in combining NLP with biomedical ontologies, along with the potential benefits; facilitate discussions within the ICBO community which we hope will advance the field; and foster new collaborations.
This half-day workshop will consist of paper presentations followed by an open discussion session on the issue of combining NLP and biomedical ontology. We invite and encourage submissions by researchers who make combined use of biomedical ontologies and NLP.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
We invite submission of both full papers (5-10 pages) and short papers (2 pages) discussing work that combines these technologies. Papers will be evaluated by the scientific program committee based on their appropriateness to the workshop, scientific merit, and novelty. Short papers are expected to cover late-breaking or preliminary work along with presentations. We aim to have presented papers published in peer-reviewed proceedings.
Submissions should be formatted using the ICBO 2019 paper template, and submitted via EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icbonlp2019
Workshop papers due: May 1, 2019 May 15, 2019
Notification of acceptance: May 30, 2019
Workshop: July29, 2019 (tentative)
Contact: icbo.nlp.2019@gmail.com