Natural language processing (NLP) in the biomedical domain focuses on understanding of the domain specific language and aims to facilitate dissemination and exchange of scientific and other information important to the progress of medicine and to the public health.
The NLP Working Group focuses on all sub-domains of biomedical NLP, including but not limited to: clinical NLP -- natural language processing methods to support healthcare by operationalizing clinical information contained in clinical narrative; processing of scientific literature, as well as gray literature, such as drug labels and clinical guidelines; and social media.
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Areas of interest to the NLP working group include, but are not limited to:
- Recognition and extraction of health-related information from text
- Clinical document analysis
- Development of tools and approaches to biomedical text understanding
- Applications of biomedical NLP in practice
- Addressing text understanding needs of clinicians, researchers and consumers
Mission
The mission of the AMIA Natural Language Processing Working Group is to facilitate communication, collaboration, training, and networking for researchers who develop, apply, and promote natural language processing in biomedical science, patient care, public health and biomedical education.
Vision
The ultimate goal of Natural Language Processing, an area of artificial intelligence, is to enable computers to analyze and use natural language at the level required for a task, be it detecting patients’ cancer stages during chart review, deriving knowledge from the literature or patient authored social media content. The NLP-WG vision for NLP in the biomedical domain is to support biomedical sciences, patient care, public health and biomedical education in a valuable manner.
Goals
AMIA NLP-WG aims to foster biomedical NLP research and applications, build a community of biomedical NLP researchers and practitioners, and establish connections among the researchers and practitioners from different scientific backgrounds and countries.
Working Group Activities
Past, Present and Future
- Working group calls
- Face to face meetings at the fall Annual Symposium and the spring Summits
- Pre-symposium meetings
- Webinars
- Journal club
- Collaboration with groups both inside and outside AMIA
- Identification and dissemination of relevant funding opportunities
- Industry-academic collaborations
- Academic guidance for early stage researchers, e.g. doctoral students
Leadership
Yanshan Wang, PhD
Satya Sahoo, PhD, FAMIA
Rui Zhang, PhD, FAMIA
Joseph Plasek, PhD
- Performing: Working Group has high level of engagement and output (workshops, papers, webinars)
- Networking: Working Group has internal and external networking opportunities for members (mentorship programs, social events, collaboration)
- Developing: New Working Group or revitalizing efforts to grow membership (recruitment efforts, leadership)