Schedule
Graduate Student Consortium, State-of-the-art biomedical and clinical NLP, and NLP for Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health
Natural Language Processing (NLP) for clinical and biomedical narratives is one of the well-established, yet rapidly growing and constantly gaining popularity areas of Medical Informatics. As this research field expands, the need for broader community engagement and resource sharing is growing. As a result, AMIA NLP-WG Pre-Symposium became a venue where AMIA researchers with interest in NLP come together and focus on the issues that augment the NLP-oriented presentations and events during AMIA Fall Symposium. These workshops have provided significant learning opportunities for newcomers to the field and have supported advancement of the state-of-the-art and sharing of resources and applications. In support of these goals, the AMIA NLP working group pre-symposium continues the tradition since its inception in 2012 to provide a unique platform for close interactions among students, scholars, and industry professionals who are interested in biomedical and clinical NLP.
This year’s pre-symposium will be divided into three sessions. Session 1 is a graduate student consortium (i.e., ‘doctoral’ consortium also opened to Master students), where students can present their work and get feedback from experienced researchers in the field. Session 2 is a state-of-the-art biomedical and clinical NLP session. We call for abstracts on recent NLP publications, events, tools, resources, shared tasks, and methodology breakthroughs within the past year, highlight and discuss accepted submissions during the session. Session 3 will be an interactive panel session on recent NLP efforts on extracting and using the social and behavioral determinants of health (SDOH) information from electronic health records (EHRs). We will discuss the opportunities and challenges and approaches to tackling the challenges as a working group and a community. Each session is planned for 120 minutes.
After participating in this workshop, attendees will be better able to:
• Presentation (slides, speech clarity and rhythm)
• Significance (real problem, real people, and potential impact)
• Innovation (new or improved, in one field or broader)
• Approach (appropriate research design, methods used, and feasibility)
• Environment (adequate resources, supervisors/collaborators, guidance)
8:30 am - 12:00 pm
1:00 pm - 2:20 pm
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
The purpose of the graduate student consortium is to provide opportunities for
direct interactions between students and researchers in the biomedical and
clinical NLP field, so that students can
1) refine their research focus;
2) discuss specific questions about study design, algorithm development, or evaluation plan;
3) receive constructive feedback and suggestions about their dissertation work; and
4) establish possible collaborations.
We invite advanced graduate students to submit abstracts for a podium presentation
of their graduate research work (in the biomedical and clinical NLP fields) to
this session. Abstracts should explain the problem, and its challenges, as well as
the novelty and significance of the work. Following peer review, accepted papers
will be presented in plenary forums and assessed for:
• Presentation (slides, speech clarity and rhythm)
• Significance (real problem, real people, and potential impact)
• Innovation (new or improved, in one field or broader)
• Approach (appropriate research design, methods used, and feasibility)
• Environment (adequate resources, supervisors/collaborators, guidance)
Four selected students will each have 15 minutes for presentation and 15 minutes
for discussion with a panel of established experts and researchers in
biomedical and clinical NLP.
This session is chaired by Dr. Abeed Sarker. The well-established NLP researchers serving
on the committee are Ozlem Uzuner, Meliha Yetisgen, Hongfang Liu, Hua Xu, Yonghui Wu,
Timothy Miller, Justin Rousseau.
We invite researchers to submit their significant research effort in biomedical
and clinical NLP, including research studies (published, in press or under development projects),
tools, resources, events, and community shared tasks in the past 12 months. The presenters
will identify themselves as the corresponding authors during the submission process, and
accepted presenters are required to make the presentation themselves.
Six submissions will be selected to give a 15-minute presentation followed by a
5-minute Q&A. This session is chaired by Dr. Yifang Peng.
Social and behavior determinants of health (SDOH) are the conditions under which people are
born, grow, live, work, and age, and include factors such as socioeconomic status,
education, employment, lifestyles, social support networks, access to medical care,
and neighborhood characteristics. These factors also have a major impact on health equity.
With the passing of the HITECH Act in 2009, there has been increased emphasis on use of EHRs
to document SDOH. While SDOH exist in structured EHRs, SDOH are primarily documented in
free-text clinical notes. NLP is the key technology to extract SDOH from clinical notes
and make such information useful for clinical and translational research. This panel will
encompass the current research and issues of NLP technologies for extracting and using SDOH
from EHRs to facilitate clinical and translational research and to improve clinical care
and health equity.
The panelist includes Dr. Rui Zhang from the University of Minnesota, Dr. Masoud Rouhizadeh
from the University of Florida, Dr. Yanshan Wang from the University of Pittsburgh,
Dr. Meliha Yetisgen from the University of Washington, Dr. Elham Hatef from
the Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Alec Chapman from the University of Utah.
Dr. Kirk Roberts from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston will moderate
this session. Each panelist will have 10 minutes to present, followed by 60 minutes interactive discussion.
Graduate students are invited to submit applications for a podium presentation of their
graduate research work (in the biomedical and clinical NLP fields). The submission is
suggested to include the following sections:
• Aims and Objectives - State the main objective(s) of your project.
• Justification for the Research Topic - Explain the motivations and significance for your project.
• Research Questions - Stating your research question is essential. This might be done in a list.
• Research Methodology - If you already have plans for your research methodology, explain them here.
If you have not found an appropriate methodology yet, or wonder which one to choose, this is also
the place to mention it. In this case, list the requirements your methodology should fulfill.
• Research Results to Date - You are not required to have results. But if you already have
some, present them here.
• References – Any relevant citation.
Researchers are encouraged to submit the most recent research studies
(published, in press or under development projects), tools, resources, events,
and community shared tasks. The following sections are suggested:
• Methods/Tools/Resources/Events/Shared Tasks Description
• Justification of the Inclusion – Explain the relevance, interest, and
value of the submission to NLP WG and its impact on medical informatics
• Summary/Outcome – A summary of the outcomes, such as participants in the
event, experimental outcomes of methods, etc.
• References