EPRS 2016 - Workshop on Extraction and Processing of Rich Semantics from Medical Texts

Medical documents bear rich semantics such as facts, experiences, opinions or information which could ? when extracted automatically - support a broad range of applications. Physicians could learn about the experiences of their colleagues, get hints to critical events in the treatment of a specific patient or receive information for improving treatment. However, language peculiarities, content diversity, streaming nature of clinical documents pose many challenges and the trade-off of filtering noise at the cost of losing information which is potentially relevant. This workshop is devoted to the technologies for dealing with clinical documents for medical information gathering and application in knowledge based systems. The aim of the workshop is to encourage researchers from the medical natural language processing (NLP) and knowledge management community to present novel issues and techniques related to the extraction and processing of rich semantics from medical texts, but more importantly to discuss current challenges and future steps towards new directions for gathering and processing rich semantics in the medical domain.