Call for papers: First Workshop on clinical Natural Language Processing for Quality of Life
Muskan Garg
We are pleased to announce a Call for Papers for the First Workshop on clinical Natural Language Processing for Quality of Life (cNLP4QoL), to be held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI) 2026, on June 1, 2026, in Minneapolis, USA.
Workshop Overview
Quality of Life (WHOQOL) is a multi-dimensional, whole-person construct encompassing physical health, psychological state, level of independence, social relationships, environment, and spirituality, operationalized through 24 facets including pain & discomfort, energy & fatigue, sleep & rest, mobility, activities of daily living, dependence on medication/treatment, work capacity, positive feelings, thinking/learning/memory/concentration, self-esteem, bodily image & appearance, negative feelings, personal relationships, social support, sexual activity, physical safety & security, home environment, financial resources, health & social care accessibility/quality, opportunities for acquiring information/skills, participation in recreation/leisure, physical environment (pollution/noise/traffic/climate), transport, and spirituality/religion/personal beliefs. Many of the most meaningful QoL indicators are primarily documented in unstructured clinical narratives and patient-generated text.
This workshop adopts a whole-person perspective and aims to bring together researchers, clinicians, and practitioners to advance robust, explainable, and clinically actionable NLP methods for extracting, modeling, and integrating QoL signals into real-world healthcare workflows.
Topics of Interest (include but are not limited to):
NLP methods for extracting, interpreting, and predicting QoL indicators
Functional, psychosocial, and behavioral health modeling from text
Explainability, trustworthiness, and reasoning in clinical language models
Annotation frameworks and evaluation metrics for subjective QoL constructs
Patient portals, clinical messages, conversations, and longitudinal narratives
Synthetic data generation, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and benchmarks for QoL
Clinical deployment and workflow integration of QoL-focused NLP systems
Applications: EHRs including clinical notes, social media data, patient narratives
Submission Types (original, unpublished work):
Regular papers (8–10 pages): mature work with substantial evaluation
Short papers (4–6 pages): innovative ideas with preliminary results
Position papers (4–6 pages): emerging directions or critical perspectives
Abstracts (2 pages): vision papers or work in progress
All submissions will undergo single-blind peer review. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and published in the IEEE ICHI 2026 Proceedings, archived in IEEE Xplore (camera-ready submission required).
Selected high-quality papers will be invited to submit an extended version to a peer-reviewed journal; discussions with prospective journals are currently underway and the final venue is to be determined (TBD).
Important Dates:
Workshop paper submission deadline: March 15, 2026
Notification of acceptance: March 21, 2026
Camera-ready papers due: March 28, 2026
Workshop date: June 1, 2026
Submission Link:
https://easychair.org/my2/conference?conf=ieeeichi2026 followed by cNLP4QoL track.
Website Link:
https://cnlp4qol.github.io/ICHI-cnlp4qol-2026/
Contact:
cnlp...@gmail.com, garg....@mayo.edu
We warmly invite contributions from the clinical NLP, healthcare informatics, AI, and medical communities, and we would greatly appreciate you sharing this CFP with interested colleagues and groups.
Best regards,