Call for papers

Please, note that this year we use both the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) system and Softconf as paper submission platforms.


The 13th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers interested in automated processing of health documents. Health documents encompass textual content of electronic health records, clinical guidelines, spontaneous reports for pharmacovigilance, biomedical literature, health forums/blogs or any other type of health-related documents. The LOUHI workshop series fosters interactions between the Computational Linguistics, Medical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence communities. It started in 2008 in Turku, Finland and has been organized 12 times: LOUHI 2010 was co-located with NAACL in Los Angeles, CA; LOUHI 2011 was co-located with Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) in Bled, Slovenia; LOUHI 2013 was held in Sydney, Australia during NICTA Techfest; LOUHI 2014 was co-located with EACL in Gothenburg, Sweden; LOUHI 2015 was co-located with EMNLP in Lisbon, Portugal; LOUHI 2016 was co-located with EMNLP in Austin, Texas; LOUHI 2017 was held in Sydney, Australia; LOUHI 2018 was co-located with EMNLP in Brussels, Belgium; LOUHI 2019 was co-located with EMNLP-IJCNLP in Hong Kong; LOUHI 2020 was co-located with EMNLP; and LOUHI 2021 was co-located with EACL.

LOUHI 2022 is soliciting papers describing original research. Papers must describe substantial and completed work but could also focus on a contribution, a negative result, a software package or work in progress. The topics include, but are not limited to, the following language processing techniques and related areas:

  • Techniques supporting information extraction, e.g. named entity recognition, negation and uncertainty detection

  • Classification and text mining applications (e.g. diagnostic classifications such as ICD-10 and nursing intensity scores) and problems (e.g. handling of unbalanced data sets)

  • Text representation, including dealing with data sparsity and dimensionality issues

  • Domain adaptation, e.g. adaptation of standard NLP tools (incl. tokenizers, PoS-taggers, etc) to the medical domain

  • Information fusion, i.e. integrating data from various sources, e.g. structured and narrative documentation

  • Unsupervised and self-supervised methods, including distributional semantics

  • Evaluation, gold/reference standard construction and annotation

  • Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of health documents

  • Anonymization / de-identification of health records and ethics

  • Supporting the development of medical terminologies and ontologies

  • Individualization of content, consumer health vocabularies, summarization and simplification of text

  • NLP for supporting documentation and decision making practices

  • Predictive modeling of adverse events, e.g. adverse drug events and hospital acquired infections

  • Terminology and information model standards (SNOMED CT, FHIR) for health text mining

  • Bridging gaps between formal ontology and biomedical NLP

We welcome submissions on topics related to text mining of health documents, particularly emphasizing multidisciplinary aspects of health documentation and the interplay between nursing and medical sciences, information systems, computational linguistics and computer science. We also encourage submissions reporting work on low-resourced languages, addressing the challenges of data sparsity and language characteristic diversity.

Submissions go through a double-blind review process, where each submission is reviewed by three program committee members. Accepted papers will be presented by the authors in a virtual workshop session. All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

The submissions should be in PDF format and anonymized for review. All submissions must be written in English and follow the EMNLP 2022 formatting requirements (available on the EMNLP 2022 website). We strongly advise the use of the Word or LaTeX template files provided by EMNLP 2022 (https://2022.emnlp.org/calls/style-and-formatting/).

* Long paper submission: up to 8 pages of content, plus unlimited pages for references and appendix; final versions of long papers: one additional page (so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account): up to 9 pages with unlimited pages for references

* Short paper submission: up to 4 pages of content, plus unlimited pages for references and appendix; final version of short papers: up to 5 pages with unlimited pages for references

Note that appendices are material that can be read, and include lemmas, formulas, proofs, and tables that are not critical to the reading and understanding of the paper.

LOUHI 2022 will accept electronic submission both via ARR and Softconf (https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2022/louhi2022/).