Introduction to Natural Language Processing of Clinical Text

Clinical and biomedical natural language processing (NLP) has a wide range of practical applications in clinical and biomedical research, quality assurance of clinical care and delivery of information to patients. Research in Clinical NLP is constantly growing. This book serves as an introduction to the areas of foundational and applied biomedical language processing, with particular focus on clinical language processing. At the time of this writing, Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrated remarkable performance in some complex language processing and language generation tasks, including tasks that involve clinical language. These advances revealed the unprecedented opportunities for language processing and the unforeseen pitfalls and complications of using LLMs. All these developments emphasize the need for knowledge of the traditional linguistically motivated and domain-knowledge grounded approaches presented in this book along with the latest developments in machine learning and LLMs.