CALL FOR PAPERS



We are pleased to announce a new TIMELINE.

A modification to the conference proceedings publication

schedule by the ACL organizers has allowed us to extend

the submission deadline to March 21, 2008.



BioNLP 2008

An ACL 2008 Workshop

Columbus, OH June 19 or 20, 2008

http://compbio.uchsc.edu/BioNLP2008

Submissions due: March 21, 2008, 11:59 PM Eastern US



Continuing a successful series of BioNLP workshops at ACL 2002,

ACL 2003, NAACL 2004, ACL 2005, NAACL 2006, and ACL 2007, and

in accordance with the ACL BioNLP tradition of presenting work

on a broad range of topics, we invite submissions on any topic

of current interest in the field of Biomedical Natural Language

Processing.



We especially encourage submissions on:



- Entity identification and normalization for a broad range of

semantic categories

- Ontologies and knowledge bases in BioNLP

- Extraction of complex relations

- The economics of text mining and database curation

- Resources and novel strategies for system testing and evaluation

- Shared tasks in the biomedical domain

- Test suites and corpora for BioNLP

- Quantifying utility to end-users

- Portability for non-developers

- Summarization

- Question-answering

- Full text and figures



Important Dates:



Submission deadline: Friday, March 21, 2008

Notification of acceptance: Sunday, April 20, 2008

Camera-ready copy due from authors: Saturday, April 26, 2008

Workshop: June 19 or 20, 2008



Submission instructions:



Two types of submissions are invited: full papers and poster abstracts.

Submissions are due by 11:59 PM EST on March 21, 2008.

Submit your paper or abstract via the ACL BioNLP 2008 site

at https://www.softconf.com/acl08/ACL08-WS05/.



Full papers should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references.

These are intended to be reports of original research.

BioNLP aims to be the forum for interesting, innovative, and

promising work involving biomedicine and language technology,

whether or not yielding high performance at the moment.

This by no means precludes our interest in and preference for

mature results, strong performance, and thorough evaluation.

Both types of research and combinations of thereof are encouraged.



Poster abstracts should not exceed two (2) pages. Accepted abstracts

will be published in a separate section of the workshop proceedings.

Appropriate poster topics include preliminary results, application

notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc.



Submissions must be electronic and in PDF format, and should follow

the two-column format of ACL proceedings. Ensure that you are

*not* in A4 format.

Please see the conference website for detailed typesetting

specifications. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX

or Microsoft Word style files available on the ACL meeting website

(http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html).

Submissions need not be anonymous. Authors who cannot submit a PDF

file electronically should contact the workshop organizers well in

advance of the submission deadline.



Dual submission policy: note that papers may not be submitted to the

BioNLP 2008 workshop if they are or will be concurrently submitted

to another meeting or publication and that other meeting or

publication prohibits dual submissions. If your paper is also

submitted to ISMB, you should expect it to be rejected by ISMB.

If your paper is or will be concurrently under consideration by

another meeting or publication, notify us of that fact in a footnote

on the first page. Do not dual-submit your BioNLP 2008 workshop

paper to ISMB.



Authors are invited to submit expanded versions of their papers to

a special issue to BMC Bioinformatics. Such papers will go through

the normal BMC review process.



Note: BMC Bioinformatics is an open access journal. As such,

submissions to a special issue bear a publication cost of £600

per paper regardless of the authors' institutional membership

in BMC. Submission to the special issue is entirely voluntary.

In order to get the special issue out in a timely fashion, we

simply ask authors of accepted papers to notify us if they plan

to submit an expanded version of their paper for the special issue.



Workshop chairs:



- Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine

- Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining

and University of Manchester, UK

- Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, The MITRE Corporation

and University of Colorado School of Medicine

- John Pestian, Computational Medicine Center,

Cincinnati Childrenâ??s Hospital and Medical Center

- Jun-ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Japan

and University of Manchester, UK

- Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh, UK





Program Committee:

Alan Aronson, LHNCBC, US National Library of Medicine

Catherine Blake, University of North Carolina

Olivier Bodenreider, LHNCBC, US National Library of Medicine

Bob Carpenter, Alias-i

Wendy Chapman, University of Pittsburgh

Aaron Cohen, Oregon Health and Science University

Nigel Collier, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo

Noemie Elhadad, Columbia University

Carol Friedman, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons

Peter Haug, University of Utah

Marti Hearst, University of California at Berkeley

Su Jian, A-star

Jin-Dong Kim, University of Tokyo

Marc Light, University of Iowa

Zhiyong Lu, NCBI, US National Library of Medicine

Aurelie Neveol, LHNCBC, US National Library of Medicine

Serguei Pakhomov, University of Minnesota

Thomas Rindflesch, LHNCBC, US National Library of Medicine

Daniel Rubin, Stanford University

Hagit Shatkay, Queen's University, Canada

Yuka Tateisi, University of Tokyo

Yoshimasa Tsuruoka, University of Manchester

Alfonso Valencia, Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia

Karin Verspoor, Los Alamos National Laboratory

W. John Wilbur, NCBI, US National Library of Medicine

Limsoon Wong, National University of Singapore

Hong Yu, University of Wisconsin

Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI



Contact:

bionlp2008@googlegroups.com (all organizers)

ddemner@gmail.com

kevin.cohen@gmail.com