The Seventh 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 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 five 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 ; and LOUHI 2015 was co-located with EMNLP in Lisbon, Portugal.

LOUHI 2016 is soliciting papers describing original research. Papers must describe substantial and completed work but also focus on a contribution, a negative result, a software package or work in progress. The areas 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 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




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 regular workshop session either as a talk or a poster. All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Similar to previous LOUHI workshops, authors of selected papers will be offered the possibility to submit extended papers for potential publication in a special issue of a high-impact journal, e.g. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making as for LOUHI 2014.

Louhi 2016 will only accept electronic submission via its START submission system (https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2016/LOUHI/). The submissions should be in PDF format and anonymized for review. All submissions must be written in English and follow the EMNLP 2016 formatting requirements (available on the EMNLP 2016 website). We strongly advise the use of the Word or LaTeX template files provided by EMNLP 2016 : http://www.emnlp2016.net/submissions.html.



• Each long paper submission consists of a paper of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus two pages for references. Final versions of long papers will be given one additional page (i.e., up to 9 pages) for content, with unlimited pages for references — so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.




• Each short paper submission consists of a paper of up to four (4) pages of content and 2 pages for references. Final versions of short papers will also be given one additional page (up to 5 pages) of content, with unlimited pages for references




Submission Instructions

The submissions should be written in English and anonymized for review and must use the Word or LaTeX template files provided by EMNLP 2016.



• Long paper submission : up to 8 pages of content, plus 2 pages for references ; final versions of long papers : one additional page : up to 9 pages with unlimited pages for references




• Short paper submission : up to 4 pages of content, plus 2 pages for references ; final version of short papers : up to 5 pages with unlimited pages for references




PDF files will be submitted electronically via the START submission system.

Program Committee



• Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester, UK




• Sabine Bergler, Concordia University, Canada




• Thomas Brox Røst, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway




• Keven B Cohen, University of Colorado/School of Medicine, USA




• Hercules Dalianis, Stockholm University, Sweden




• Louise Deléger, INRA, France




• Filip Ginter, University of Turku, Finland




• Natalia Grabar, CNRS UMR 8163, STL Université de Lille3, France




• Gintaré Grigonyté, Stockholm University, Sweden




• Aron Henriksson, Stockholm University, Sweden




• Antonio Jimeno Yepes, IBM Research, Australia




• Jussi Karlgren, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden




• Dimitrios Kokkinakis, University of Gothenburg, Sweden




• Maria Kvist, Stockholm University, Sweden




• Alberto Lavelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy




• David Martinez, University of Melbourne and MedWhat.com, Australia




• BeÁta Megyesi, Uppsala University, Sweden




• Marie-Jean Meurs, UQAM & Concordia University, QC, Canada




• Fleur Mougin, Université de Bordeaux, ERIAS, Centre INSERM U897, ISPED, France




• Danielle L Mowery, University of Utah, USA




• Henning Müller, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Switzerland




• Mariana Lara Neves, Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany




• Jong C. Park, KAIST Computer Science, Korea




• Rezarta Islamaj-Dogan, NIH/NLM/NCBI, USA




• Tapio Salakoski, University of Turku, Finland




• Stefan Schulz, Graz General Hospital and University Clinics, Austria




• Isabel Segura-Bedmar, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain




• Maria Skeppstedt, Stockholm University, Sweden




• Hanna Suominen, NICTA, Australia




• Suzanne Tamang, Stanford University School of Medicine, USA




• özlem Uzuner, MIT, USA




• Sumithra Velupillai, Stockholm University, Sweden




• Karin Verspoor, NICTA, Australia




• Mats Wirén, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden




(to be completed)