Call for Papers
Healthcare narrative (such as clinical notes, discharge letters, nurse handover notes, imaging reports, patients’ posts on social media or feedback comments, etc.) has been used as a key communication stream that contains the majority of actionable and contextualised data, but which – despite being increasingly available in a digital form – is not routinely analysed, and is rarely integrated with other healthcare data on large-scale. There are many barriers and challenges in processing healthcare free text, including, for example, the variability and implicit nature of language expressions, and difficulties in sharing training and evaluation data and language models. On the other hand, recent years have witnessed increasing needs and opportunities to process free text, with a number of success stories that have demonstrated the feasibility of using advanced Natural Language Processing to unlock evidence contained in free text to support clinical care, patient self-management, epidemiological research and audit.
As with previous conferences, HealTAC 2022 will bring the academic, clinical, industrial, and patient communities together to discuss the current state of the art in processing healthcare free text and share experience, results, and challenges. We invite various types of contributions, including research papers, posters, PhD student papers, demos, tutorials, and panels that address the variety of topics and aspects involved in processing and using healthcare free text (see below). The Programme Committe will also award best paper, poster and demo prizes.
Authors of all accepted contributions will be encouraged to share their papers on an archive site. Following the conference, there will be an open call to submit a journal length paper for further peer review and publication in a journal. In the past, post-conference special issues have appeared in Frontiers in Digital Health and Journal of Biomedical Semantics.
Topics
Topics include but are not limited to:
- Natural language processing of healthcare text
- Speech analytics for healthcare applications
- Information extraction: identification of clinical variables and their values in free text
- Medical ontologies and coding of healthcare text
- Machine-learning approaches to healthcare text analytics
- Transfer learning for healthcare text analytics
- Multi-lingual and cross-lingual healthcare text analytics
- Processing patient-generated data (e.g., social media, health forums, diaries)
- Processing clinical literature and trial reports
- Integration of structured and unstructured resources for health applications
- Text analytics and learning health systems
- Explainable models for healthcare NLP
- Real-time processing of healthcare free text
- Real-world application of healthcare text analytics
- Scalable and secure healthcare NLP infrastructures
- Implementation of healthcare text analytics in practice: public engagement and trust
- Sharing resources for healthcare text analytics (data, models, and methods)
- Reproducibility in the healthcare text analytics
- Ethics and governance for healthcare text analytics
- Evaluation and assessment of healthcare text analytics methods
- Text mining for veterinary medicine
Paper and poster submissions
Papers
- Submissions will describe either methodological or application work that has not been previously presented in a conference. Papers may consist of between 4 and 8 pages, plus references. Accepted papers will be orally presented at the workshop either as long presentations or as flash/lightning talks and will be invited as contributions for a special issue.
Posters
- Posters will describe ideas or ongoing work (e.g., projects), and will be offered space for presentation and discussion during the conference. Posters should be single-page submissions.
PhD student papers
- PhD student papers will be presented at the PhD forum, which will feature projects in healthcare text analytics. The forum will provide an opportunity for students to present their work to the community and receive friendly feedback from an expert panel. These submissions should consist of up to 4 pages and should present ongoing PhD research (at any stage).
Special sessions
Panel discussions
- Panel discussions can be proposed to address key opportunities or challenges in processing healthcare free-text or to discuss methodologies. A panel should focus on a specific challenge, application area or methodological development. It would typically feature 3-5 panellists giving a brief presentation or making a position statement, followed by discussion with an active role for the audience. Proposals for panels should consists of up to 2 pages and should clearly specify the motivation and aims, intended outcome (e.g., clarification of challenges), target audience and the structure of the session.
Software and data demo sessions
- Demo sessions will provide a forum for demonstration of solutions, datasets, and projects to the wider community. Proposals for demos should consists of up to 2 pages. Up to 30-minute slots will be made available for each demo.
Tutorials
- Tutorials will provide opportunities for hands-on training on specific topics, methods, or environments for the wider healthcare text analytics community, in any area of the interest. Proposals for tutorials should consists of up to 2 pages, indicating the motivation, main learning outcomes and intended audience. Tutorial slots will be discussed with the authors, considering half and full day events.
Industry forum
- Technology awareness, the “rebirth” of AI, and financial pressures are increasingly leading the health sector to engage with the text analytics industry for the provision of solutions to deliver data for research, administration and for regulatory requirements. The health sector presents the industry with a unique set of organisational, technical, social, and economic problems. The Industry Forum will be led by a panel of experts from both industry and service procurement, and will explore these issues by presenting real world examples, and through in-depth discussion and debate with the audience.
Key dates
Submission deadlines
- Papers and panel/tutorial proposals: 21st of March 2022
- PhD forum, posters and demos:
11th of April 202222nd April 2022
Notification date
- Notification of acceptance:
25th of April 202229th April 2022
Events dates
- Tutorials date: 14th of June 2022 (online)
- Conference dates: 15th and 16th of June 2022 (online)
Submission site
EasyChair submission link: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=healtac2022