2025Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed
MEMBERSHIP
SIGBIOMED is ACL's special interest group for Biomedical Natural Language Processing that encompasses all sublanguages related to health, ranging from biology to clinical language in all registers and health literacy levels.
Membership currently stands at 238, up from 224 in 2024.
ORGANIZATION
The Chair, Vice-Chair and the Secretary are completing their 3-year term. The Nominating committee issued a call for nominees; voting will take place in July 2025 and the results will be announced at the BioNLP 2025 workshop. In compliance with the BioNLP constitution, the elected officers will serve for 3 years.
WORKSHOP
We held two workshops in 2024: BioNLP 2024 @ ACL 2024 that attracted about 80 attendees and the first workshop on patient-oriented language processing CL4Health at LREC-COLING 2024. CL4Health was met with great enthusiasm and the attendees unanimously voted for continuing this specialized workshop. CL4Health 2025 @NAACL attracted good number of strong submissions and had good attendance.
FUNDS
Sophia Ananiadou received a small grant from Chen Institute: https://brand.cheninstitute.org/ The grant will cover the invited speaker registration and prizes for students representing most interesting approaches in the four shared tasks held in conjunction with BioNLP 2025.
WEBSITE and MAILING LIST
We have a working site https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/SIGBIOMED that lists upcoming events of interest to our members and links to BioNLP proceedings.
We use the BioNLP and AMIA nlp-sig mailing lists for announcements and discussions.
Links to our Google groups: https://groups.google.com/g/sigbiomed https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bionlpinfo