Proceedings of the Workshop on BioNLP 2007: Biological, Translational, and Clinical Language Processing

Natural language processing has a long history in the medical domain, with research in the field dating back to at least the early 1960s. In the late 1990s, a separate thread of research involving natural language processing in the genomic domain began to gather steam. It has become a major focus of research in the bioinformatics, computational biology, and computational linguistics communities. A number of successful workshops and conference sessions have resulted, with significant progress in the areas of named entity recognition for a wide range of key biomedical classes, concept normalization, and system evaluation. A variety of publicly available resources have contributed to this progress, as well. Recently, the widely recognized disconnect between basic biological research and patient care delivery stimulated development of a new branch of biomedical research---translational medicine. Translational medicine, sometimes defined as the facilitation of "bench-to-bedside" transmission of knowledge, has become a hot topic, with a National Center for Biocomputing devoted to this theme established last year. This workshop has the goal of addressing and bringing together these three threads in biomedical natural language processing, or "BioNLP:" biological, translational, and clinical language processing.