Objectives:
•Describe experiences and difficulties of screening evidence for populating systematic reviews for public-health topics.
•Provide an overview of text-mining methods and demonstrate a system developed by the National Centre for Text Mining to support screening: the RobotAnalyst.
•Present results of an evaluation of RobotAnalyst for a number of systematic reviews.
•Explore the wider potential benefits of Robot Analyst for supporting evidence synthesis for guideline development.

Description: Text-mining methods have the potential to reduce time and costs for the development of evidence reviews.
The workshop will be structured into four parts:
1) A general discussion of the challenges of searching and screening evidence for public health systematic reviews.
2) An overview of text-mining methods and a demonstration of the Robot Analyst. This is a bespoke application developed to support the evidence-review process for the development of public-health guidelines.
3) Presentation of results from NICE and Cochrane Switzerland on the evaluation of the system. Results will be presented on the potential time savings, specificity of the text-mining functionality and value of additional features in the system for the generation of evidence reviews.
4) An interactive discussion on the transferability of text-mining functionality beyond public health including a international panel of experts who will take questions and comments from participants.