Published: The special issue of BMC Bioinformatics on Recent Preocesses with BioNLP Open Shared Tasks
BioNLP Open Shared Tasks (BioNLP-OST) is organized to facilitate development and sharing of computational tasks of biomedical text mining (TM) and solutions to them. It is a continuation of the previous efforts organized around the BioNLP Shared Task (BioNLP-ST) workshop series (2009, 2011, 2013, 2016).
BioNLP-OST is organized as a reformulation of BioNLP-ST. The reformulation was motivated to make the efforts scientifically sounder and more sustainable. The change, which is represented by the newly added keyword “open” in the title, is summarized below:
Since task registration to BioNLP-OST will be open, it will effectively open the scope of the tasks. While the focus will still be on information extraction (IE) tasks, we also expect relevant tasks to IE, which may include but not limited to the following tasks :
All deadlines are AoE (Anywhere on Earth)
A Workshop on BioNLP Open Shared Tasks (BioNLP-OST) 2019 will be organized to present and discuss on the results of the shared tasks.
For the workshop, we will solicit original papers of three types:
All the submissions go through a single blind review process, where each submission will be reviewed by three program committee members. The reason for single blind review process instead of double blind process is that it is neither possible nor practical to hide the author identity in case of shared task papers. Accepted papers will be presented by the authors in the workshop session either as a talk or a poster, and will also be published in the workshop proceedings.
The International Workshop on BioNLP Open Shared Tasks (BioNLP-OST) 2019 will be collocated with EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 either on 3rd or 4th of November, in Hong Kong.
In previous experiences of shared task organization, it was observed that investigation is often continued after the workshop, based on new insights obtained through discussions during workshop. The workshop functions as a venue for the different types of contributors, mainly task providers and solution providers, to meet together and exchange their experiences and insights. As a venue to compile the results of follow-up investigation, a journal special issue will be organized to be published a few months after the workshop. The specific journal will be announced after negotiation with publishers.