The specific characteristics of biomedical and clinical text motivate the need to develop specialised NLP and text mining methods, or to adapt or reengineer existing tools. Most such techniques will be reliant on access to one or more resources that provide information about domain-specific language usage, thus highlighting their central role. Accordingly, it is important to provide fora in which the current state of the art of such resources, as well as the NLP and text mining tools that make use of them, can be evaluated and discussed.

Since 2008, the biennial Workshops on Building and Evaluating Resources for Biomedical Text Mining have allowed dissemination of current developments in the field, and have provided the opportunity to discuss current problems, ideas, questions and open issues, and to understand current and potential uses of resources.

The fifth workshop in this series (BioTxtM 2016) will once again aim to bring together researchers who have developed or evaluated NLP tools and resources for biomedical or clinical applications (e.g., text mining, multilingual search, machine translation, information extraction, question-answering), as well as domain experts/health professionals who use or would benefit from the use of such resources and tools. By complementing traditional presentations with a focussed discussion session and, for the first time, a shared task sessions, the workshop aims to stimulate novel research efforts and collaborations between researchers and professionals with complementary knowledge and skills. We particularly welcome submissions that handle languages other than English, or which facilitate multilingual access to information.

BioTxtM 2016, which will take place on 12th December 2016 in Osaka, Japan, is a workshop of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics.