Call for Papers

Clinical text is growing rapidly as electronic health records become pervasive. Much of the information recorded in a clinical encounter is located exclusively in provider narrative notes, which makes them indispensable for supplementing structured clinical data in order to better understand patient state and care provided. The methods and tools developed for the clinical domain have historically lagged behind the scientific advances in the general-domain NLP. Despite the substantial recent strides in clinical NLP, a substantial gap remains. The goal of this workshop is to address this gap by establishing a regular event in CL conferences that brings together researchers interested in developing state-of-the-art methods for the clinical domain. The focus is on improving NLP technology to enable clinical applications, and specifically, information extraction and modeling of narrative provider notes from electronic health records, patient encounter transcripts, and other clinical narratives.

Clinical text offers unique challenges that differentiate it not only from open-domain data, but from other types of text in the biomedical domain as well. Notably, clinical text contains a significant number of abbreviations, medical terms, and other clinical jargon. Clinical narratives are characterized by non-standard document structures that are often critical to overall understanding. Narrative provider notes are designed to communicate with other experts while at the same time serving as a legal record. Finally, clinical notes contain sensitive patient-specific information that raise privacy and security concerns that present special challenges for natural language systems.

We invite high-quality original submissions that develop methods to address the above challenges to NLP in the clinical domain. We are interested in work that specifically focuses on advancing the state-of-the-art in clinical NLP, rather than merely applies existing NLP systems to downstream clinical problems (such as outcome prediction or clinical cohort selection). The submissions may include initial results from promising new methods that may spark interest from other members of the Clinical NLP community and lead to collaborative work. The following is a list of topics of interest for this workshop:

• Modeling clinical text in standard NLP tasks (tagging, chunking, parsing, entity identification, relation extraction, coreference, summarization, etc.)
• De-identification and other handling of protected health information
• Structure of clinical documents (e.g., section identification)
• Information extraction from clinical text
• Integration of structured and textual data for clinical tasks
• Domain adaptation techniques for clinical data
• Medical terminologies and ontologies
• Annotation schemes and annotation methodology for clinical data
• Evaluation techniques for the clinical domain

Submissions

Submissions may have a maximum length of eight (8) pages for long papers and four (4) pages for short papers, with unlimited pages for references and appendices. All submissions must be made through ACL Rolling Review and follow ACL Rolling Review style guidelines. The ACL Rolling Review submission sites on OpenReview are here:

https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/ARR

You must submit to ACL Rolling Review by 15 Mar 2022, as you must have your reviews back from ACL Rolling Review by 8 May 2022 to be considered for Clinical NLP 2022.

Commitment

Once you have reviews back from ACL Rolling Review, you may commit your reviews to Clinical NLP 2022 by filling out the commitment form here:

https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/NAACL/2022/Workshop/Clinical_NLP

You should submit this commitment form by 8 May 2022. Because of delays in ARR March 2022, the committment form will stay open through 15 May 2022. If you committed your reviews to NAACL 2022, and you find you are not accepted by NAACL on 7 Apr 2022, you may commit the same reviews to Clinical NLP 2022 if the topic is appropriate to the workshop.

Important Dates

Event	Date
Latest submission to ARR	Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Commitment deadline for Clinical NLP 2022	Sunday, May 8, 2022
Late committments allowed due to ARR delay	Sunday, May 15, 2022
Notification of acceptance	Monday, May 23, 2022
Final versions of papers due	Friday, June 3, 2022
Workshop	Thursday, July 14, 2022

Workshop Organizers

• Anna Rumshisky (UMass Lowell)
• Kirk Roberts (University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston)
• Steven Bethard (University of Arizona)
• Tristan Naumann (Microsoft Research)