The Third Annual Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology Workshop

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
CLPsych, at NAACL 2016
Location: 
Co-Located with NAACL 2016
Thursday, 16 June 2016
State: 
California
Country: 
USA
City: 
San Diego
Contact: 
Organizers
Submission Deadline: 
Thursday, 25 February 2016

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First Call for Papers
The Third Annual Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology Workshop (CLPsych, at NAACL 2016)
San Diego, California, June 16/17th
Website: http://clpsych.org/
Submissions deadline: February 25, 2016

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-- Description --

This workshop will focus on language technology applications in mental and neurological health. We aim to bring together natural language processing (NLP) researchers with clinicians, with the following four goals:

- To increase NLP practitioners' understanding of what people working in the field of mental and neurological health --- clinicians, psychologists, and social workers --- do, and what their real needs are;
- To increase clinicians' understanding of what's possible in NLP and its offerings;
- To identify challenges that need to be overcome; and
- To formulate targets and priorities for near-term improvement of the practical state-of-the-art.

Instead of the traditional presentation+questions format, each paper accepted for oral presentation will also have a clinically-oriented discussant, who will read the paper thoroughly in advance and briefly present prepared commentary. Each submitted paper will also be reviewed by a mental or neurological health expert.

We are particularly interested in submissions that bear on issues like the following, relative to psychological conditions and neurological disorders:

- What features of language or speech could play a prominent role in diagnosis, monitoring, or longitudinal therapeutic assessment?
- What algorithms and forms of modeling are applicable?
- What kinds of data exists or could be obtained?
- What tools or resources does this research make available?
- What practical or ethical issues require attention?

We aim to emerge from the workshop discussions with a further strategy for progress in this field, informed by both the NAACL and clinical psychologist participants. This could include, for example, identifying additional topics, tasks, and data; formulating a plan for creating and sharing IRB application templates for NLP work in psychology; or identifying the top-level requirements for an NLP toolkit specifically devoted to practical issues in clinical psychology.

-- Shared Task --

CLPsych 2016 will once again include a Shared Task. This year's task centers on classifying posts from a mental health forum to assist forum moderators in triaging and escalating posts requiring immediate attention. Further details are available here: http://clpsych.org/shared-task-2016/

-- Paper Submission instructions --

A key goal of this workshop is to foster the conversation with clinicians, both at the workshop and when these papers are read in the future. We are therefore including practicing mental health clinicians and clinical researchers on our program committee; the ability to communicate ideas, approaches, and results clearly to people who are not computational linguistics experts will be as important as the quality of the work itself.

We encourage you to include supplementary materials (up to 2 pages) with technical details kept out of the body of the paper. These and other supplementary materials, such as code or datasets, will be linked via URL in the final version of the accepted paper.

Submissions can contain up to 8 pages of content, plus references of any length, plus up to 2 pages of supplementary materials as described above. Supplementary materials should be self-contained (i.e., should start on a separate page). Papers must conform to the NAACL 2015 submission format guidelines, as detailed in the NAACL 2015 Call for Papers. Submissions should be anonymous. Papers must be submitted using the START system.

We will accept submissions for either oral or poster presentation.

-- Important dates --

Submissions deadline: February 25, 2016
Notifications sent to authors: March 20, 2016
Final, camera-ready papers due: March 30, 2016
Workshop in San Diego: June 16 or 17, 2016

-- Organizers --

Kristy Hollingshead, IHMC
Lyle Ungar, University of Pennsylvania

To contact the organizers, please mail clpsych2016-organizers [at] googlegroups.com.

-- Web sites --

General information: http://clpsych.org/
NAACL conference site: http://naacl.org/naacl-hlt-2016/