NLPMC 2023: 3rd Workshop on NLP for Medical Conversations

at IJCNLP-AACL 2023.

Overview

Technological advancements have been transforming healthcare rapidly in the past several years. This has been further catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Several policy changes made by the government allow added flexibility to enable remote treatment of patients. COVID-19, its symptoms, and medications are being widely discussed on online. While medical discussions on public forums were prevalent earlier, their prevalence is now highlighted due to the scale of the pandemic.

To address healthcare consumers, EHR companies have been working to make health data of patients easily available to patients. More recently, technology companies are also stepping in. Smart speakers are now common in households and users interact with them about personal and public health issues. Healthcare providers are also making use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding to understand doctor-patient conversations and generate medical documentation automatically. Solutions that can reliably transcribe Clinical Notes, update electronic medical/health records (EMR/EHR), and provide assistive decision support can also significantly reduce the load on physicians who need to spend nearly two hours on creating and updating documentation for every hour of direct patient care.

While applying NLP to open domain is getting increasingly popular, medical conversations present unique challenges and opportunities for impact. The speech research community also took notice and Interspeech 2022 had the first special session focused on medical conversations. After our successful events in 2020 and 2021, we are excited to continue the cross-pollination between NLP researchers and medical practitioners. The goal of this workshop is to discuss state-of-the-art approaches in conversational AI, as well as share insights and challenges when applied in healthcare. This is critical in order to bridge gaps between research and real-world product deployments, this will further shed light on future directions. This will be a one-day workshop including keynotes, spotlight talks, posters, and panel sessions.

Dates

All deadlines are 11:59 PM Pacific time.

• Workshop Paper Due Date: September 22, 2023
• Notification of acceptance: October 3, 2023
• Camera-ready papers due: October 27, 2023
• Workshop date: November 1, 2023

Submission

The workshop will accept submissions via SoftConf (Submission Link).

Invited Speakers

Details about the speakers and talks can be found here.

Topics

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Medical Conversation Summarization
• Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction in Medical Conversations
• Transfer Learning and Domain Adaptation Techniques for Medical Conversations
• Use of External Ontologies in Medical Conversation Modeling
• Collection and Dissemination of Resources for Medical Conversation Analysis
• Evaluating Medical Conversation Summarization Systems
• Multi-modal (e.g. images, reports, etc.) Clinical Data Processing
• Longitudinal (e.g. across multiple patient visits) Data Processing in Clinical Domain
• Annotation schemes and methodologies for Clinical Data
• Interpretable Systems for Clinical Note Generation
• Privacy, bias, and fairness in Medical Conversation Processing

Organizers

The workshop is organized by Sopan Khosla (AWS AI Labs), Chaitanya Shivade (AWS AI Labs), Vinayshekhar Bannihatti (AWS AI Labs), Rashmi Gangadharaiah (AWS AI Labs), Thomas Schaaf (3M), Sandeep Konam (Hitloop), Kevin Lybarger (George Mason University), Aleksandar Savkov (JABS MedTech)

For any questions, please email nlpmc2023@gmail.com or join our Google Group.

Location

NLPMC 2023 will be held in hybrid mode (in-person and virtual), co-located with IJCNLP-AACL 2023.