Sumithra Velupillai attended the CLEF eHealth lab organized at the CLEF conference in Valencia, 23 – 26 September 2013.
The CLEF conference “promotes the systematic evaluation of information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks”. This year, there were nine labs with different specific information access problems.
Sumithra was one of the co-organizers of the CLEFeHealth lab together with researchers from Australia, US, Ireland, Finland and more. This year’s lab included three research tasks:
- Task 1: identification of disorders from clinical reports and mapping of the SNOMED CT disorders to UMLS codes
- Task 2: mapping abbreviations and acronyms in clinical reports to UMLS codes
- Task 3: information retrieval to address questions patients may have when reading clinical reports
There was considerable interest in these tasks: 20 countries, 34 teams and 113 submitted systems! During the lab sessions in Valencia, the task teams were invited to describe their work in more detail, the winning teams were invited to describe their solutions along with fruitful discussions with the lab attendees. The lab also contained a student mentoring track for which senior researchers were assigned a mentoring role.
Next year’s CLEFeHealth will include three new information access tasks related to health text.