First Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4HEALTH) @ LREC-COLING 2024

https://bionlp.nlm.nih.gov/cl4health2024/

Torino, Italy (co-located with LREC-COLING 2024)

SCOPE

This first workshop on patient-oriented language processing aims to establish a general venue for presenting research and applications focused on patients’ needs, including summarizing health records for the patients, answering consumer-health questions using reliable resources, detecting misinformation or potentially harmful information, and providing multi-modal information, such as video, if it better satisfies patients’ needs. Such a venue is needed both to invigorate patient-oriented language processing research and to build a community of researchers interested in this area. The growing interest in this topic is fueled by several current trends:

- a proliferation of online services that target patients but do not always act in their best interests
- policy changes that allow patients to access their health records written in the professional vernacular, which may confuse the patients or lead to misinterpretation;
- replacement of customer services with chat bots; and
- the increasing tendency of patients to consult online resources as a second or even first opinion on their health problems.

We invite papers concerning all areas of language processing focused on patients’ health. The workshop will be centered on language technologies for health-related issues concerning the public that include, but are not limited to:

- accessibility and trustworthiness of health information provided to the public
- explainable and evidence-supported answers to consumer-health questions
- accurate summarization of patients’ health records at their health-literacy level
- understanding patients' non-informational needs through their language, and accurate and accessible interpretations of biomedical research

Broadly, CL4Health is concerned with the resources, computational approaches, and behavioral and socio-economic aspects of the public interactions with digital resources in search of health-related information that satisfies their information needs and guides their actions.

The topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to the following:

- Health-related information needs and online behaviors of the public
- Quality assurance and ethics considerations in language technologies and approaches applied to text and other modalities for public consumption
- Summarization of EHR data for patients
- Detection of misinformation in health-related resources and mitigation of potential harms
- Consumer-health question answering
- Biomedical text simplification/adaptation
- Dialogue systems to support patients’ interactions with clinicians, healthcare systems, and online resources
- Linguistic resources, data and tools for language technologies focusing on consumer health
- Resources, strategies and metrics for system testing and evaluation
- Infrastructures and pre-trained language models for consumer health
- Processing and annotation platforms
- Synthetic data generation and data augmentation.


IMPORTANT DATES
(Tentative)

March 15, 2024 - Paper submissions due
April 5, 2024 - Camera-ready papers due
May 20, 2024 - Workshop @ LREC-COLING


SUBMISSIONS

Two types of submissions are invited:

- Full papers: should not exceed eight (8) pages of text, plus unlimited references. These are intended to be reports of original research.
- Short papers: may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Appropriate short paper topics include preliminary results, application notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc.

Electronic Submission: Submissions must be electronic and in PDF format, using the Softconf START conference management system. Submissions need to be anonymous. The submission site will be announced shortly.

Dual submission policy: papers may NOT be submitted to the workshop if they are or will be concurrently submitted to another meeting or publication.

INVITED TALKS

- Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois Chicago
- Abeed Sarker, Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Research in Biomedical Informatics @ Emory School of Medicine
- Natalia Grabar, CNRS Researcher, Université de Lille

ORGANIZERS

- Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine
- Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining and University of Manchester, UK
- Paul Thompson, National Centre for Text Mining and University of Manchester, UK
- Brian Ondov, US National Library of Medicine