As the whole world has been dramatically impacted by the COVID19 pandemic, the response of all research communities has been swift and effective, as shown by the exceptionally rapid development of a number of therapeutic responses. The NLP community has provided an important contribution to the worldwide effort to fight the pandemic by providing important resources and organizing a number of events aimed at eliciting contributions relevant for this important quest. Examples of resources that have been rapidly created with the purpose of promoting NLP research relevant for COVID19 are the LitCovid resource by the US National Library of Medicine, the CORD-19 open research corpus by the Allen Institute for AI, and the related CORD-19 challenge. The major NLP conferences have seen the rapid organization of dedicated workshops, such as the NLP COVID-19 emergency workshop at ACL 2020 and at EMNLP 2020.
We are organizing the first Swiss “NLP for COVID-19” event, which will include a brief survey of the relevant activities carried worldwide, presentation of relevant activities in Switzerland, such as CovidTriage, the COVID annotator, the COVID-19 Twitter monitor, and the COVID19 clinical literature repository.
Workshop Schedule
- 14:00-14:30: NLP efforts against COVID-19, Fabio Rinaldi
- 14:30-14:45: Individual experiences with pandemic SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19), Giovanni Spitale
- 14:45-15:00: COVID-19 clinical literature repository, Oscar Lithgow
- 15:00-15:15: The COVID-19 twitter monitor, Joseph Cornelius
- 15:15-15:30: Annotating the Pandemic—Named Entity Recognition and Normalisation in COVID-19 Literature, Nico Colic
- 15:30-16:00: CovidTriage—An ontology-driven engine to support literature triage for Covid-19, Patrick Ruch
Fabio Rinaldi
Fabio Rinaldi is currently responsible for NLP research at IDSIA (Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence), in Southern Switzerland. Until 2019 he was a lecturer and senior researcher at the University of Zurich, as well as PI in a number of research projects. He co-authored more than 100 scientific papers (including more than 30 journal papers), dealing with topics such as Ontologies, Entity Extraction, Answer Extraction, Text Classification, Document and Knowledge Management, Language Resources and Terminology. He has more than 25 years of experience in NLP research. In recent years his major focus of interest has been text mining applications in the biomedical domain, such as automatic analysis of the scientific literature, of clinical reports, and health-related social media discussions.
Patrick Ruch
Patrick Ruch is currently a professor and chairman of the Information Sciences department of the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO) in Geneva. He is also leader of the Text Mining group of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, which maintains text analytics services to support the curation of SIB databases such as Swiss-Prot and neXtprot (~ one million queries a year). Before these appointments, he has been working for a dozen years in several clinical & research environments, including the National Library of Medicine (NIH, Bethesda, MD), the University Hospitals of Geneva, and IBM Research in Zürich, where he developed text-driven decision support systems for life scientists and healthcare professionals.