BioNLP.

This tutorial will provide general natural language processing specialists with an introduction to the field of "BioNLP"---natural language processing in the fields of medicine and biology. This field has long roots in the history of natural language processing, but has been an absolutely burgeoning area of interest in recent years. The past few years have been characterized by an unusual mixing of bioinformatics and NLP specialists at the conferences of both communities: ACL or NAACL has now hosted workshops on BioNLP every year since 2002, with excellent attendance numbers, and bioinformatics and medical informatics meetings have featured NLP papers, sessions, and SIG meetings since the late 1990s. Recent MUC-like and TREC-sponsored shared tasks have had some unusual results, and the implications of these findings should make for an interesting tutorial for the general NLP specialist.