ICHI-cnlp4qol-2026

First Workshop on Clinical Natural Language Processing for Quality of Life (CNLP4QoL)

In conjunction with IEEE ICHI 2026 Minneapolis, MN, USA June 1, 2026

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📋 Table of Contents

  1. Overview
  2. Call for Papers
  3. Keynote Speakers
  4. Program Schedule
  5. Organizing Committee
  6. Venue & Contact

Overview

Quality of Life (QoL) is a multidimensional, patient-centered construct reflecting how health, functional ability, psychological state, and social context shape an individual’s lived experience and overall well-being. Despite its central role in preventive care, mental health, chronic disease management, and complementary and integrative medicine, QoL remains poorly represented in structured health records. The most meaningful QoL indicators such as functional decline, emotional distress, pain burden, fatigue, sleep disruption, mobility limitations, and social connectedness, are predominantly documented in unstructured clinical narratives, patient-reported outcomes, and patient-generated text. Recent advances in clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to systematically extract, model, and monitor these signals, enabling earlier detection of deterioration and more patient-centered clinical decision-making.

Despite growing methodological progress, significant challenges limit the reliable and scalable use of NLP for QoL assessment. QoL signals are not single, well-defined clinical entities; they are often implicitly expressed and require contextual interpretation of severity, duration, and temporal change rather than simple presence or absence. Furthermore, there is a lack of standardized conceptual models, annotation guidelines, evaluation metrics, and governance frameworks for QoL-focused NLP systems, hindering reproducibility, comparability, and clinical trust. These gaps impede translation into real-world workflows, even though poor QoL is strongly associated with adverse outcomes such as functional decline, mental health crises, hospitalization, and mortality. Addressing these challenges requires coordinated, multidisciplinary efforts to establish shared benchmarks, trustworthy modeling practices, and implementation-ready frameworks for integrating NLP-derived QoL indicators into routine clinical care.

CNLP4QoL 2026 convenes multidisciplinary experts to develop robust, explainable, and clinically actionable NLP frameworks for measuring and integrating these signals into real-world care. By moving beyond disease-centric paradigms, this workshop adopts a whole-person perspective on QoL, encompassing wellness, function, psychosocial well-being, and lived experience.


Call for Papers

We invite researchers, clinicians, informaticians, data scientists, and innovators to submit original, unpublished research and work-in-progress papers.

Thematic Scope & Challenges

Significant challenges currently limit the scalable use of NLP for QoL assessment. QoL signals are not single, well-defined clinical entities; they are often implicitly expressed and require contextual interpretation of severity, duration, and temporal change rather than simple presence/absence detection. Furthermore, the field lacks standardized conceptual models and governance frameworks.

Topics of Interest

We encourage submissions covering, but not limited to:

Submission Guidelines

All submitted papers and abstracts will undergo a single-blind peer-review process. Accepted papers will be published in the IEEE ICHI 2026 Proceedings, archived in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Templates: Please follow the IEEE conference templates. Submissions must contain the names and affiliations of authors listed on the paper.

Submission: Link followed by cNLP4QoL track selection.

Important Dates

Milestone Date
Submission Deadline March 15, 2026
Notification of Acceptance March 24, 2026
Camera-Ready Due March 31, 2026
Presentation + Videos Submission May 18, 2026
Workshop Date June 1, 2026

Keynote Speakers

Sunghwan Sohn, PhD

Sunghwan Sohn

Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN

Bio: Sunghwan Sohn, Ph.D., has expertise in mining large-scale electronic health records (EHRs) to unlock unstructured and hidden information through natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques. Dr. Sohn develops strategies for the best use of informatics, ranging from precision medicine to population health, in order to achieve better solutions for people. Dr. Sohn’s research helps the best use of EHRs to solve clinical problems and improve public health. His work provides biomedical scientists and clinicians access to the rich yet untapped information embedded in clinical narratives. Leveraging AI-driven EHR data analytics, his work provides the healthcare community with the valuable insights needed for advancing clinical research and improving care to people.

Website · Google Scholar · LinkedIn


Rui Zhang, PhD

Rui Zhang

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN

Bio: Dr. Zhang is Professor and Founding Chief of Division of Computational Health Sciences at the University of Minnesota. He was named as McKnight Presidential Fellow and hold several leadership roles, including Chair of AI and Data science for Healthcare workgroup within the UMN’s Data Science and AI Hub, Associate Director of Health AI & Data Science for the Center for Learning Health System Sciences, the Director of Natural Language Processing/Information Extraction (NLP/IE) research program, and previously served as Director of NLP at UMN’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Dr. Zhang’s research is at the forefront of integrating novel AI with healthcare research and practice, analyzing multimodal biomedical data, including electronic health records, biomedical literature, and patient-generated data. His research is fully supported by multiple NIH grants as Principal Investigator, focusing on transformative AI projects including mining safety use of dietary supplements (two NCCIH R01s), discovering drug repurposing of Alzheimer’s disease (NIA R01), predicting breast cancer treatment related cardiotoxicity (NCI R01), identifying medical language bias in kidney transplantation (NIDDK R01), and develop knowledge graph on complementary and integrative health (NCCIH U01). He has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles, including Natural Medicine, Natural Communications, Natural Digital Medicine. His work has been reported by The Wall Street Journal, and interviewed by CBS News. Dr. Zhang is a Fellow of International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (FIAHSI), Fellow of American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI) and Fellow of AMIA. He is the current Chair of AMIA Natural Language Processing (NLP) Working Group.

Website · Google Scholar · LinkedIn


Sandeep Pagali, MD, MPH

Sandeep Pagali

Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN

Bio: Sandeep R. Pagali, M.D., M.P.H., is a geriatrician and hospitalist. He is committed to improving care for older adults in the hospital. His research interest is in predicting the risk of hospitalization for older adults with delirium. He focuses on identifying what resources are needed and how they can be best applied to prevent and treat occurrences of delirium. He also studies the role and effectiveness of approaches other than medication in cognitive decline and dementia-related behaviors. Dr. Pagali is very enthusiastic in research related to polypharmacy, treatment with multiple drugs. He is focused on reducing the number of drugs patients are taking. Dr. Pagali also studies ways to improve care transitions for the older adults with an emphasis on care delivery outside of the hospital.

Website · Google Scholar · LinkedIn


Program Schedule (Monday, June 1, 2026)

Time Activity Presenter/Authors Title
08:15 – 08:25 Welcome Remarks & Introduction Eunji Jeon Foundational aspects of clinical NLP for Quality of Life
08:25 – 08:50 Keynote #1 Sunghwan Sohn Mobility Functional Status Ascertainment in EHRs
08:50 – 09:15 Keynote #2 Sandeep Pagali Leveraging NLP to Detect Delirium Hidden in the Electronic Health Record – Opportunity and Value
09:15 – 09:45 Session 1: Oral Presentations Roopika Ganesh and Heena Rathore Repetition-Aware Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback for Empathetic Dialogue
Himanshu Tripathi, Kaushik Roy, Shahram Rahimi, Subash Neupane and Sean Bozorgzad From Protocol to Practice: Graded Sepsis Bundle Compliance and Actionable Insights from Real-World ICU Data
09:45 – 10:15 ☕ Break & Poster Session Candyce Kroenke, Rhonda Aoki, Jane Liang, David Cronkite, Salene Jones, Jessica Mogk, Larry Kushi, Lauren Mammini, Shaila Strayhorn-Carter, David Mosen and Stacey Alexeeff The EHRsupport score, an electronic health record-based social support measure
Chen Xie, Di Zhu, Ziwei Wang, Haoyun Zhang and Zihan Wei Explainable AI for Mental Health Detection from Social Media: A Comparative Study of Traditional Machine Learning and a Large Language Model
Aarushi Jaitly, Helom Berhane, Deepa Burman, Anand Rao, Ramayya Krishnan and Rema Padman Multi-Agent AI Frameworks for Clinical Diagnosis Support: Benchmarking LLM Reasoning with Sleep Disorders as a Testbed
Esther Lázaro, Vanessa Moscardó, Salvador Herrera-Pérez, Patricia López-Mases and María-Victoria Fux NLP Guided by Qualitative Methodology: Computational Analysis and Qualitative Approaches to Quality of Life
Salim Sazzed, Farhan Noor Dehan and Md Ehashan Rabbi Pial Eating Disorders Among Individuals with Suicidal Distress: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Reddit Data on Prevalence, Demographics, and Psychiatric Comorbidity
10:15 – 10:35 Keynote #3 Rui Zhang Complementary and Integrative Health for Whole Person health: from Knowledge Graph to Discovery to Real-World Evidence
10:35 – 11:05 Session 2: Oral Presentations Chen Xie, Di Zhu, Ziwei Wang, Haoyun Zhang and Zihan Wei Compliance-Aware Discharge Agent for Auditable ICU Discharge Planning: A Pilot Feasibility Study Using Structured eICU Records
Salim Sazzed, Farhan Noor Dehan, Pronoy Sarker and Md Ehashan Rabbi Pial Beyond Risk Detection: Functional Roles of Substance Use in Suicidal Discourse Among Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Eating Disorders
11:05 – 11:35 Hands-on Tutorial Pushkala Jayaraman, Humayera Islam Large language models for extracting wellness dimensions
11:35 – 11:45 Closing Remarks & Future Directions Muskan Garg Open research directions for applied clinical NLP in Quality of Life

Organizing Committee

Workshop Organizers

Program Committee


Venue & Contact

IEEE ICHI 2026 will be held in Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Please visit the ICHI 2026 website for registration, travel grants, and accommodation details.

Contact: For questions regarding the workshop, submission eligibility, or sponsorship, please email:
📧 cnlp4qol@gmail.com


© 2026 CNLP4QoL Workshop Organizers. Hosted on GitHub Pages.