HealTAC 2026

Human-Centered AI & NLP: Bridging Research and Real-World Practice

8-10 June 2026, Brighton, UK

HealTAC 2026 will bring the academic, clinical, industrial and patient communities together to discuss the current state of the art in processing healthcare free text and share experience, results and challenges.

We invite contributions that address any aspects of processing healthcare narrative and speech, including methodological advances, ethical issues, design and deployment challenges and integration with other healthcare data on large-scale. This year’s topic is "Human-Centered AI & NLP: Bridging Research and Real-World Practice". 

Submission Guidelines

Extended abstracts will describe either methodological or application work that has not been previously presented in a conference. Contributions should consist of up to 2 pages, excluding references and a study context section, and should be prepared based on the template provided on the conference website submissions page.

Submissons for software demonstrations and panel discussions may also be made using the same template.

Descriptions of ongoing PhD research (in any stage) or planned fellowship applications may be submitted, and should consist of up to 4 pages (excluding references and study context) using the same template. These will be treated separately from the other submissions. Papers accepted for these categories will be presented in a separate PhD / Fellowship forum.

Please note that each submission will have to include a Study Context explaining any ethics consideration and approvals, funding, stakeholder involvement (e.g. patients and public), availability of data and methods, conflicts of interest, collaborators, etc. The study context does not count towards the page limit.

Authors will specify their preferred way of presenting their contribution: as an oral presentation, flash/lightning talk, poster or demo. 

List of Topics

HealTAC 2026 invites contributions that address any aspect of healthcare text analytics. This year’s topics will focus on "Human-Centered AI & NLP: Bridging Research and Real-World Practice", but other topics are also welcome. Please see the call for papers on the conference website for a suggested list of topics.

Committees

Program chairs

• Arlene Casey, University of Edinburgh
• Phoey Teh, Prifysgol Wrecsam / Wrexham University

Conference chairs

• Angus Roberts, King's College London
• Elizabeth Ford, Brighton and Sussex Medical School

Invited Speakers

• Aline Villavicencio, Professor of Natural Language Processing in the Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter
• Martin Krallinger, head of the NLP for Biomedical Information Analysis team at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Publication

HealTAC 2026 authors will be invited to submit an extended version of their paper. This will undergo a separate review for publication in Frontiers in Digital Health, within a special research topic.

Venue

Holiday Inn Brighton Seafront, 137 Kings Road, Brighton BN1 2JF, United Kingdom

Contact

healtac2026@kcl.ac.uk