So I recently came back from the Association for Computational Linguistics', of which I am now a member, annual BioNLP (Biological Natural Language Processing) conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Firstly, I was in a hotel across from the Baltimore Orioles stadium and, not being the biggest fan of baseball, I definitely got my fill of baseball fans, hat-sellers, and hot dog vendors constantly yelling about their hate for the Yankees.
Since I only attended the 2 day workshop this was a little different than my normal conference travel. I attended sessions where people were doing molecular NLP tasks (such as querying Pubmed and other journals) in order to garner data and conduct metadata or real data analysis. These researchers typically utilized SVMs in their algorithmic analysis for their results, which gives me good ideas about where to take my own research. Unfortunately, most of the sessions were molecular NLP-oriented tasks, whereas my focus is more on clinical NLP, which is a different type of problem, by nature. Namely, scientific/structured writing is a lot easier to parse rather than unstructured notes written by different medical professionals.
No one at the conference is using the NLP system that I am using, which was a disappointment, but I was able to broaden my horizons to other systems such as i2b2 and biocreative. In my own research we are utilizing cTAKES/ytex.The conference included a panel of scientists that helped create these newer systems so that was a nice surprise to hear what it's like on the other side of research.
I will elaborate more on these systems when we decide if we want to steer away from the usage of cTAKES for one of these newer systems or if we decide to keep going down the road with which we are familiar.
Music listened to while blogging: Hellyeah
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