Lang4Health Workshop at PROPOR 2026

Lang4Health workshop

Description

The First Workshop on Language Technologies for Health (Lang4Health1) is a workshop dedicated to the development and application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies in the healthcare field. Language technologies are becoming more prevalent in health domain for electronic health record (EHR) screening (Da Rocha et al. 2022), dataset construction (Oliveira et al. 2022; Santos, Oliveira, and Paraboni 2024), language representation model development (Gumiel et al. 2019; Nunes et al. 2024) for applications such as named entity recognition (Andrade, Ruas, and Couto 2021; Schneider et al. 2020) or chatbot development (Pires, Caseli, and Neris 2023; Souza et al. 2022). Despite its growing relevance, there are still some open challenges in the field of NLP for healthcare that need to be addressed.

The workshop will provide participants with the opportunity to present and discuss novel research ideas on active and emerging topics related to NLP in healthcare field for Portuguese, Galician and their variants. The workshop will also be an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to collaborate on new projects.

This workshop is proposed in the scope of AIM-Health project, an international research project between Brazil and UK supported by FAPESP and UKRI/MRC – UK Research and Innovation / Medical Research Council, focused on the development of AI and NLP technologies for mental health.

Following the workshop, we intend to invite the authors of the accepted papers to submit an extended version for a special edition of the journal Language Resources and Evaluation.

Lang4Health 2026 will be co-located with PROPOR 2026, which will be held from April 13th to April 16th at Salvador – BA, Brazil. The exact date of the workshop will be announced soon.

Call for Paper

We call for papers describing work on any topic related to computational language and speech processing in the health domain by researchers in industry or academia. The papers must deal with Portuguese language varieties or their dialects. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Data in health domain
    • Dataset/Corpus construction and availability;
    • Dataset/Corpus annotation;
    • Anonymization and de-identification;
    • Augment and synthetic data generation.
  • Language technologies in health domain
    • Interaction and conversational agents (e.g. chatbots);
    • Information extraction and information retrieval;
    • Named Entity Recognition;
    • Summarization;
    • Question Answering;
    • Personalization;
    • Speech processing;
    • NLP-supported diagnosis;
    • Accessibility and simplification of information;
    • Language support for digital phenotyping.

Submission format

Submissions should describe original, unpublished work. Authors are invited to submit two kinds of papers:

  • Full papers – Reporting substantial and completed work, especially those that may contribute in a significant way to the advancement of the field. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. Full papers can have up to 8 pages of content, plus 2 pages for appendices and unlimited pages of references.
  • Short papers – Reporting small, focused contributions such as ongoing work, position papers, potential ideas to be discussed, or negative results. Short papers can have up to 4 pages of content, plus 1 page for appendices and unlimited pages of references.

The papers must be written in English or Portuguese. At submission time, only PDF format is accepted. For the final versions, authors of accepted papers will be given 1 extra content page to incorporate the reviews’ suggestions. Authors of accepted papers will be requested to send the source files for the production of the proceedings. All submitted papers must conform to the ACL style guidelines and use the LaTeX or MS Word stylesheets available at PROPOR 2026.

Multiple-submission policy

For submissions that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications, this information must be provided at submission time. If a submission is accepted, authors must notify the program chairs, indicating which meeting they choose for presentation of their work. Papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere cannot be accepted for publication or presentation.

Review process

Each submission will be evaluated by at least two reviewers. As reviewing will be double-blind, submitted papers must be anonymized. That is, they should not contain the authors’ names and affiliations. Authors must avoid self-references that reveal identity, like “We previously showed (Freitas, 1991) …”. Instead, they should prefer citations such as “Freitas (1991) previously showed …”. Separate author identification information will be required as part of the submission process.

Submit your paper

Link to submission platform will be available soon.

Important dates

  • Deadline for paper submission: February 2, 2026

  • Notification to authors: March 10, 2026

  • Camera-ready deadline: March 20, 2026

  • Electronic proceedings: March 27, 2026

Organizing Committee

  • Prof. Aline Villavicencio
    University of Exeter, UK

  • Dr. Rodrigo Wilkens
    University of Exeter, UK  

  • Prof. Helena Caseli
    Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil

  • Dr. Vânia Neris
    Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil

Contact information

Email

References

Andrade, Vitor DT, Pedro Ruas, and Francisco M Couto. 2021. “Named Entity Recognition and Linking: A Portuguese and Spanish Oncological Parallel Corpus.” bioRxiv, 2021–09.
Da Rocha, Naila Camila, Abner Macola Pacheco Barbosa, Yaron Oliveira Schnr, Juliana Machado-Rugolo, Luis Gustavo Modelli de Andrade, José Eduardo Corrente, and Liciana Vaz de Arruda Silveira. 2022. “Natural Language Processing to Extract Information from Portuguese-Language Medical Records.” Data 8 (1): 11.
Gumiel, Yohan Bonescki, Arnon Bruno Ventrilho dos Santos, Lilian Mie Mukai Cintho, Deborah Ribeiro Carvalho, Sadid A Hasan, Claudia Maria Cabral Moro, et al. 2019. “Learning Portuguese Clinical Word Embeddings: A Multi-Specialty and Multi-Institutional Corpus of Clinical Narratives Supporting a Downstream Biomedical Task.” In MEDINFO 2019: Health and Wellbeing e-Networks for All, 123–27. IOS Press.
Nunes, Miguel, João Boné, João C Ferreira, Pedro Chaves, and Luis B Elvas. 2024. “MediAlbertina: An European Portuguese Medical Language Model.” Computers in Biology and Medicine 182: 109233.
Oliveira, Lucas Emanuel Silva e, Ana Carolina Peters, Adalniza Moura Pucca Da Silva, Caroline Pilatti Gebeluca, Yohan Bonescki Gumiel, Lilian Mie Mukai Cintho, Deborah Ribeiro Carvalho, Sadid Al Hasan, and Claudia Maria Cabral Moro. 2022. “SemClinBr-a Multi-Institutional and Multi-Specialty Semantically Annotated Corpus for Portuguese Clinical NLP Tasks.” Journal of Biomedical Semantics 13 (1): 13.
Pires, Isabella, Helena Caseli, and Vânia Neris. 2023. “Design de Um Chatbot Para o Diálogo Com Universitários Com Possível Perfil Depressivo.” In Anais Estendidos Do XXIII Simpósio Brasileiro de Computação Aplicada à Saúde, 7–12. Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil: SBC. https://doi.org/10.5753/sbcas_estendido.2023.229543.
Santos, Wesley Ramos dos, Rafael Lage de Oliveira, and Ivandré Paraboni. 2024. “SetembroBR: a social media corpus for depression and anxiety disorder prediction.” Language Resources and Evaluation 58 (1): 273–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09633-0.
Schneider, Elisa Terumi Rubel, João Vitor Andrioli de Souza, Julien Knafou, Lucas Emanuel Silva e Oliveira, Jenny Copara, Yohan Bonescki Gumiel, Lucas Ferro Antunes de Oliveira, Emerson Cabrera Paraiso, Douglas Teodoro, and Cláudia Maria Cabral Moro Barra. 2020. “BioBERTpt - a Portuguese Neural Language Model for Clinical Named Entity Recognition.” In Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, edited by Anna Rumshisky, Kirk Roberts, Steven Bethard, and Tristan Naumann, 65–72. Online: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.clinicalnlp-1.7.
Souza, Paula Maia de, Isabella da Costa Pires, Vivian Genaro Motti, Helena Medeiros Caseli, Jair Barbosa Neto, Larissa C Martini, and Vânia Paula de Almeida Neris. 2022. “Design Recommendations for Chatbots to Support People with Depression.” In Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems. IHC ’22. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3554364.3559119.

Footnotes

  1. Lang4Health logo was generated using Canva’s AI assistant↩︎