Microgrant report: Arighi Oct.2017

ISB-Microgrant report of the BioCreative VI workshop
By Cecilia Arighi

The BioCreative VI workshop took place on October 18-20, 2017 in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

BioCreative is a community-wide effort for evaluating text mining systems applied to the biological and biomedical domain. The meeting attracted participants from the biomedical natural language processing, biocuration, literature/publishing, research and funding
domains (over 60 workshop participants, one third being students), and 36 teams participated in the track activities (with representation from America, Asia, Europe and Australia).

The scientific program covered:

  1. the talks related to the individual tracks (ran previous to the workshop) with biocuration relevant topics (assignment of bioentity IDs to facilitate downstream curation; text mining services for triage for human kinases; extraction of causal network information using the Biological Expression Language; mining protein-protein interactions affected by mutations; and annotation of chemical-protein interactions)
  2. a panel about Innovation in biomedical digital curation with views presented by users, publishers, literature service providers
  3. a panel on funding stakeholders where funding opportunities and needs for text mining and collaborations were presented by representatives from various funding agencies;
  4. a general session for text mining topics that showcased other interesting bioNLP work;
  5. 2 keynote speakers (Dr. Patricia Flatley Brennan, Director, National Library of Medicine, talked about future of data-powered health, and Dr. Hongfang Liu, Mayo Clinic, discussed opportunities and challenges of text mining in precision medicine.
  6. a poster session with Additional points discussed included the challenges of using real data over a gold standard; the strategic direction of BioCreative; and the relationship with other NLP challenge evaluations.

Corpora and datasets from the different tracks are publicly available (with prior registration). The workshop Proceedings is publicly available on the BioCreative website.

Funds were used towards the rental of room for the poster session, and the ISB was listed as sponsor.