BioCreative invites task and panel proposal submissions in preparation for the 2015 workshop, to be held September 9-11th, 2015 in Sevilla, Spain.

BioCreative challenges consist of a community-wide effort to evaluate text mining and information extraction systems applied to the biological domain. The main emphasis is on the comparison of methods and the community assessment of scientific progress, rather than on the purely competitive aspects. In the past ten years BioCreative challenges have spanned a number of tasks particularly important to biocuration for the effective extraction of biologically relevant information from the literature

In order to better serve the community, we are soliciting proposals from the larger community for new BioCreative Tasks and Panel Sessions.

A BioCreative panel proposal would highlight an interesting research topic that might result in useful applications for end-users from the biomedical and bioinformatics domain, and could potentially translate to a task in future BioCreative challenges. Click here for more information.

A BioCreative task proposal would outline a ready to run text mining task whose results should be reported in the BioCreative V workshop. Click here for more information.

Submission Deadline is October 15, 2014.

1-BioCreative Call for Workshop Panel Proposals

The BioCreative (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction in Biology) evaluation Workshops offer the opportunity to discuss the results of cutting-edge text mining and information extraction strategies applied to a set of tasks relevant to the biomedical domain. A unique characteristic of this effort is its collaborative and interdisciplinary nature, bringing together experts from various fields, including Text Mining and Natural Language Processing, biocuration, publishing houses and bioinformatics.

In order to highlight interesting research topics that might result in useful applications for end-users from the biomedical and bioinformatics domain, the BioCreative workshops include panel sessions with invited experts that can contribute to better characterize the user needs and design potential new tasks.

Past panels have included publisher perspectives, approaches to system interoperability and applications of text mining to metagenomics.

In this opportunity, we are inviting the community to submit a 1-page proposal for a workshop panel for BioCreative V, to be held in September 2015, Sevilla, Spain.

Proposals will be reviewed by the BioCreative Steering Committee and decisions will be given in a timely manner. Criteria for acceptance of proposals include the following:

• The proposal addresses a research area of interest to a significant number of end users with a clear need for integrating text mining systems to improve the analysis of and access to relevant information.
• The information that needs to be integrated for the topic of interest must be contained in publicly accessible data repositories.
• A list of international experts willing to commit to attending the workshop and presenting their perspective on the area of interest should be provided.
• A tentative list of discussion topics should be included which could be covered in a discussion panel of one hour.

Proposal Submission

We request that you submit your proposals by October 15, 2014, by electronic mail (no postal submissions) to: krallinger.martin@gmail.com with Subject BioCreative V Panel proposal.

2-BioCreative Call for Task Proposals

BioCreative invites task proposals for the 2015 workshop, to be held September, 2015 in Sevilla, Spain. Specifically, we are soliciting proposals from the larger community for new BioCreative Tasks.

We request that you submit your proposals by October 15, 2014, by electronic mail (no postal submissions) to: Rezarta.Islamaj@nih.gov with the subject line “BioCreative V task proposal”. You can also direct any inquiries concerning this process to the same email address.

Task Proposal Content

Task proposals for BioCreative 2015 should be between two and four pages in length, and should contain the following information:

• Title of the task
• Task description: A short description of the task and a justification of why the proposed task is appropriate for BioCreative. Discuss why the task is timely and important, and how the task is being addressed now in the field. If possible, provide a baseline performance using an existing method to help assess the difficulty of the proposed task. Address both background and novelty. The first issue concerns related work, other evaluations, and published systems that do something similar, while the second issue relates to important aspects that have not been addressed so far.
• Task data: A short description of the data detailing the source and size of training, development, and test data. The data should be publicly available, and use of BioC as an interchange format is preferred. Ideally, there should exist curated data resources that can be used as the basis for developing training data, along with annotation guidelines. If available, provide a sample annotated corpus; if data is not yet fully annotated, include explicit plans for its completion (e.g. annotators, annotation tool, etc.).
• Task Evaluation: A short description specifying how the submitted results will be evaluated, the proposed metrics for evaluation and whether the software to perform the evaluation exists; if not, specify who will develop the evaluation software.
• Task Timeline: Provide a suggested timeline for completion of the task, including preparation of training data, release of training and test data, evaluation and system write ups.
• Task organizing committee: Describe the team, and their prior experience.
• Task beneficiaries: State what community this task is relevant to, and how they will benefit from the tools/capabilities developed through the task. Explain how this community would participate or contribute to the task. For an interactive task, suggest communities who would be candidate participant users.
• Task participants: Suggest potential participants for the task.

Proposal Evaluation Criteria

The Biocreative Workshops generally consist of five specific tasks. Proposals will be reviewed by the Steering Committee and decisions will be given in a timely manner. Criteria for acceptance of proposals include the following:

• Perceived interest to the BioCreative community
• Design of the task
• Appropriate number of participants
• An appropriate organizing committee
• Lack of such activities on the topic on other venues, or the appropriateness of bringing this activity to the BioCreative venue.

Accepted proposals will be advertised on the BioCreative website, and other regular mailing lists. Proposals should be submitted as soon as possible but no later than October 15, 2014. Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be sent to submitters around November 15, 2014. Task organizers will be included in the BioCreative Organizing Committee.

The task organizers will be responsible for:

• Writing task descriptions for the BioCreative workshop website, calls for participation and registration, which BioCreative will distribute to its membership
• Advertising the task, especially to potential audiences outside the BioCreative community
• Reviewing requests to participate in the task and determining task participants
• Scheduling the activities of the task
• Submitting accepted author lists and papers for the BioCreative workshop proceedings.
• Participating in BioCreative Organizing Committee meetings (typically every 2-3 weeks)

The BioCreative Organizing Committee will provide logistical support, will take care of all local arrangements, and will arrange for reproducing and distributing the proceedings, as well as arranging for a special issue.