============================= *Invitation to Shared Task 4 #SMM4H: Extraction of the clinical and social impacts of nonmedical substance use from Reddit* =============================

Substance use, both prescription and illicit, has become a significant public health concern, leading to addiction, overdose, and associated health issues. Understanding the clinical impacts and social impacts of nonmedical substance use is essential for improving the treatment of substance use disorder.

In this Named Entity Recognition (NER) task, we focus on two entity types: clinical impacts and social impacts. Instances in the clinical impacts category describe the clinical effects, consequences, or impacts of substance use on individuals' health. Instances the social impacts describe the societal, interpersonal, or community-level effects, consequences, or impacts of nonmedical substance use. Systems designed for this task need to detect these impacts and automatically distinguish between clinical impacts and social impacts in text data derived from Reddit. We anticipate that the strategies will involve leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs).

Participating teams have the opportunity to submit a short system description paper for the SMM4H proceedings. The 9th Social Media Mining for Health Research and Applications Workshop (SMM4H) is co-located with ACL 2024, to be held in Bangkok, Thailand. Website: https://healthlanguageprocessing.org/smm4h-2024/

You can find more details on SMM4H Shared Task 4 on Codalab: https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/16648 Registration Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet9w5zqlaZMZVuPqvW2GnBYTs5_NUjU4r2...

------ *Important Dates* ------ Training data available: Jan 10, 2024 CodaLab Available: Jan 17, 2024 Test data available: Apr 17, 2024 Evaluation end: Apr 24, 2024 System description paper due: May 17, 2024 Paper acceptance notification: June 17, 2024 Camera-ready papers due: July 1, 2024 Workshop in Bangkok, Thailand (co-located with ACL 2024): August 15, 2024 (hybrid event, online presentation will be available) *All deadlines are 11:59 PM UTC (3:59 PM PST). No extension will be provided.*

------ *Organizers of Shared Task 4* ------ Abeed Sarker, Emory University, USA Yao Ge, Emory University, USA Swati Rajwal, Emory University, USA Sudeshna Das, Emory University, USA

*Questions on Shared Task 4 may be addressed to Yao Ge, Emory University, USA (yao.ge@emory.edu yao.ge@emory.edu)*