Bashar Nuseibeh and colleagues from the The Open University took part in the 2011 i2b2/VA/Cincinnati Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical data. Their paper ‘A Hybrid Model for Automatic Emotion Recognition in Suicide Notes’ was awarded the ‘best research paper’ at the Challenges Workshop, held in Washington DC, and will appear in the Bioinformatics Insights Journal.

Bashar and his team were also the winners out of 24 world-wide participating teams in the "Sentiment Analysis on Suicide Notes" task, ahead of Microsoft Research (Asia) and the Mayo Clinic, who were ranked in 2nd and 3rd place, respectively.

The work is part of a research project investigating the application of natural language processing techniques to requirements documents to identify tacit knowledge.