Call for Papers & Participation: The ClinicalNLP 2023 Workshop & Shared Tasks at ACL 2023

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.

Relevant topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Modeling clinical text in standard NLP tasks (tagging, chunking, parsing, entity identification, entity linking/normalization, 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 and transfer learning techniques for clinical data
• Generation of clinical notes: summarization, image-to-text, generation of notes from clinical conversations, etc.
• Annotation schemes and annotation methodology for clinical data
• Evaluation techniques for the clinical domain
• Bias and fairness in clinical text

In 2023, Clinical NLP will encourage submissions from the following special tracks:

• Clinical NLP in languages other than English
• Clinical NLP in low-resource settings
• Clinical NLP for clinical conversations (e.g., doctor-patient)

The 5th Clinical NLP Workshop will be co-located with ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada - July 14, 2023.

Joint Track with MWE

Clinical NLP 2023 is also co-organizing a special track with the 19th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2023). The goal is to foster future synergies that could address scientific challenges in the creation of resources, models and applications to deal with multiword expressions and related phenomena in the specialised domain of Clinical NLP. Submissions describing research on multi-word expressions in the specialized domain of Clinical NLP, especially introducing new datasets or new tools and resources, are welcome.

Note that submissions to this track must be submitted to MWE, not Clinical NLP by their earlier submission deadline, 20 Feb 2023. Please visit the MWE 2023 website for more details. Submissions accepted to this “Multi-word expressions in Clinical NLP” special track will have the opportunity to present their work first at MWE 2023 at EACL and then also at Clinical NLP 2023 at ACL.

Shared Task

Clinical NLP 2023 is hosting the MEDIQA-Chat Shared Tasks on doctor-patient conversations, which focuses on the following tasks:

1. Dialogue2Note Summarization: Given a conversation between a doctor and patient, participants are tasked with producing a clinical note summarizing the conversation with one or multiple note sections (e.g. Assessment, Past Medical History, Past Surgical History).
2. Note2Dialogue Generation: Given a clinical note, participants are tasked with generating a synthetic doctor-patient conversation related to the information described in the clinical note section(s).

Please visit the shared task website to register to participate and for additional information about the shared tasks.

Submissions

The OpenReview submission site is:

• https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2023/Workshop/Clinical_NLP

All submissions must follow ACL formatting guidelines, including:

• Submissions should be anonymous and must not include any identifying information about the authors
• Long papers may have up to eight (8) pages of content and short papers may have up to four (4) pages of content.
• You are allowed unlimited pages for references
• Any “Limitations” section or “Ethics Statement” is similar to references; it does not count toward the page limit.

Clinical NLP 2023 has no preprint restrictions; you may post to arXiv at any time. Clinical NLP 2023 workshop proceedings are archival will be published on the ACL Anthology.

We encourage submissions of papers submitted to but not accepted by EACL 2023, ACL 2023, or ACL Rolling Review, as long as the topics are relevant to Clinical NLP.

Important Dates

All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (anywhere on Earth)

Event	Date
Shared task registration opens	Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Shared task release of training and validation sets	Friday, February 10, 2023
Shared task release of the test sets	Wednesday, March 15, 2023
Shared task run submission deadline	Friday, March 17, 2023
Shared task release of official results	Friday, March 31, 2023
Submission deadline (both general and shared task)	Thursday, May 4, 2023
Notification of acceptance	Monday, May 29, 2023
Final versions of papers due	Tuesday, June 6, 2023
Workshop	Friday, July 14, 2023

Workshop Organizers

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

For inquiries, please contact: clinical-nlp-workshop-organizers@googlegroups.com.