The International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine (LBM) is a biennial interdisciplinary forum that brings together researchers in biology, chemistry, medicine, public health and informatics to discuss and exploit cutting edge language technologies.

Language, in its many forms, is the universal means to represent, convey, and question knowledge. Although knowledge is still widely communicated through natural languages, biology and medicine also use a number of other means of communication: sequences, ontologies, chemical and mathematical formulae, modelling languages, graphs, images, etc. Associated technologies such as text mining and information extraction, systems modelling, information visualization, semantic indexing, and semantic querying are key for advancing biomedical research and healthcare provision. The automation and integration of all these solutions will enhance our understanding and discovery of knowledge in biology and medicine. As all the individual technologies are constantly being challenged by user demands and complexities in an interdisciplinary research environment, the LBM symposium series aims to offer a forum for synergistic interactions between them.

The Fourth LBM symposium (LBM 2011) will be held at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore as a pre-conference workshop of the 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 25), on December 14th and 15th, 2011. We invite papers about any aspect of language use in biology, chemistry, medicine, public health, pharmacology and related areas. We welcome papers on natural language processing, ontology engineering and matching, bio-sequence analysis, systems modelling, database systems, logical inference, information visualization, and image retrieval. This year we particularly encourage submissions focusing on languages in health-care and chemistry to reflect recent research trends in translational medicine and clinical and chemical informatics. The topics include, but are not limited to:

- Text mining, retrieval, and management
- Semantic indexing and querying
- Ontology construction, mapping, integration, and maintenance
- Sequence analysis using language processing techniques
- Data modelling and annotation languages
- Information integration and visualization
- Languages for health-care and chemistry

Paper Submission Deadline: September 5, 2011 September 16, 2011
Paper Acceptance Notification: September 30, 2011 October 9, 2011
Poster Submission Deadline: October 15, 2011 October 20, 2011
Poster Acceptance Notification: October 24, 2011
Camera Ready Version Due: October 27, 2011
Symposium Dates: December 14-15, 2011

LBM 2011 will offer a diversity of high quality presentations: keynote and invited talks, research presentations (short and long papers) with two special highlight tracks on languages in health-care and chemistry, poster presentations and a panel discussion. Research presentations will be selected by peer review from the Programme Committee, and the accepted papers will be distributed to participants in a digital form during the Symposium, together with the accepted papers of the PACLIC 25. We will also have best paper awards.

We intend to publish the best submissions in special issues of peer reviewed journals. We have selected the Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JBCB) for publications with a strong focus on biomedical informatics, the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS) for publications with a strong focus on semantic resources and their use in applications, and the Journal of Computing Science and Engineering (JCSE) for publications with a strong focus on computational and engineering issues.

Jong C. Park and Limsoon Wong Goran Nenadic and Jung-jae Kim

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