The ISMB Special Interest Group on Linking Literature, Information and Knowledge for Biology (BioLINK) organized a one-day workshop at ISMB/ECCB 2013 in Berlin, Germany. The theme of the workshop was Roles for text mining in biomedical knowledge discovery and translational medicine. This summary reviews the outcomes of the workshop. Meeting themes included concept annotation methods and applications, extraction of biological relationships and the use of text-mined data for biological data analysis.