The future of natural language processing for biomedical applications

The idea to convey researchers who applied natural language processing (NLP) methods to the medical domain and others who applied such methods to the bio-informatics domain is shared at different places. The European Commission will edit a white paper on potential synergies between medical informatics and bio-informatics before the end of 2002. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has selected this theme for its Fall Symposium 2002. The European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) congress MIE 2005 in Geneva has been announced with the sub-title: The new challenge, Merging Medical Informatics and Bio-Informatics . Moreover, NLP and information retrieval (IR) communities have offered forums or hosted events for reaching out to the medical informatics/bio-informatics communities: Workshop on NLP in the biomedical domain at ACL 2002 in Philadelphia or genomics pretrack investigated by the TREC community. The bio-informatics community has also a tradition of using NLP techniques and the Pacific Symposium on Bio-Informatics (PSB) conference has had a regular NLP-related session in the last 4 or 5 years (NLP, knowledge discovery, data mining). Professor Tsujii in Tokyo hosted a workshop on NLP and Ontology Building for Biology in February 2002. Many other events cannot be mentioned here. In this context, the workshop held in Nicosia, Cyprus, as a special topics conference of EFMI in March 2002, could not miss the opportunity of being one of the precursors of this promising new research direction. Scientific meetings are numerous and adding just another one to the list is not challenging. But, trying to bring to the front the emerging trends of research, looking forwards for new techniques, tools or methods susceptible to cross-fertilize different domains, imagining synergies between researchers of different origin and different scientific culture, have been motivations for a new call for papers in October 2001. A small-scale workshop has been devised. A very constrained time frame of 5 months from the call to the conference was pushing all the actors. An excellent local organization by the Cyprus Medical Informatics Association was another ingredient for success.