scholarly journals Clinical Natural Language Processing in 2014: Foundational Methods Supporting Efficient Healthcare

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (01) ◽  
pp. 194-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Névéol ◽  
P. Zweigenbaum ◽  

Summary Objective: To summarize recent research and present a selection of the best papers published in 2014 in the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP).Method: A systematic review of the literature was performed by the two section editors of the IMIA Yearbook NLP section by searching bibliographic databases with a focus on NLP efforts applied to clinical texts or aimed at a clinical outcome. A shortlist of candidate best papers was first selected by the section editors before being peer-reviewed by independent external reviewers. Results: The clinical NLP best paper selection shows that the field is tackling text analysis methods of increasing depth. The full review process highlighted five papers addressing foundational methods in clinical NLP using clinically relevant texts from online forums or encyclopedias, clinical texts from Electronic Health Records, and included studies specifically aiming at a practical clinical outcome. The increased access to clinical data that was made possible with the recent progress of de-identification paved the way for the scientific community to address complex NLP problems such as word sense disambiguation, negation, temporal analysis and specific information nugget extraction. These advances in turn allowed for efficient application of NLP to clinical problems such as cancer patient triage. Another line of research investigates online clinically relevant texts and brings interesting insight on communication strategies to convey health-related information. Conclusions: The field of clinical NLP is thriving through the contributions of both NLP researchers and healthcare professionals interested in applying NLP techniques for concrete healthcare purposes. Clinical NLP is becoming mature for practical applications with a significant clinical impact.

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (01) ◽  
pp. 228-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Névéol ◽  
P. Zweigenbaum

Summary Objectives: To summarize recent research and present a selection of the best papers published in 2016 in the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Method: A survey of the literature was performed by the two section editors of the IMIA Yearbook NLP section. Bibliographic databases were searched for papers with a focus on NLP efforts applied to clinical texts or aimed at a clinical outcome. Papers were automatically ranked and then manually reviewed based on titles and abstracts. A shortlist of candidate best papers was first selected by the section editors before being peer-reviewed by independent external reviewers. Results: The five clinical NLP best papers provide a contribution that ranges from emerging original foundational methods to transitioning solid established research results to a practical clinical setting. They offer a framework for abbreviation disambiguation and coreference resolution, a classification method to identify clinically useful sentences, an analysis of counseling conversations to improve support to patients with mental disorder and grounding of gradable adjectives. Conclusions: Clinical NLP continued to thrive in 2016, with an increasing number of contributions towards applications compared to fundamental methods. Fundamental work addresses increasingly complex problems such as lexical semantics, coreference resolution, and discourse analysis. Research results translate into freely available tools, mainly for English.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (01) ◽  
pp. 234-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Zweigenbaum ◽  
A. Névéol ◽  

Summary Objective: To summarize recent research and present a selection of the best papers published in 2015 in the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Method: A systematic review of the literature was performed by the two section editors of the IMIA Yearbook NLP section by searching bibliographic databases with a focus on NLP efforts applied to clinical texts or aimed at a clinical outcome. Section editors first selected a shortlist of candidate best papers that were then peer-reviewed by independent external reviewers. Results: The clinical NLP best paper selection shows that clinical NLP is making use of a variety of texts of clinical interest to contribute to the analysis of clinical information and the building of a body of clinical knowledge. The full review process highlighted five papers analyzing patient-authored texts or seeking to connect and aggregate multiple sources of information. They provide a contribution to the development of methods, resources, applications, and sometimes a combination of these aspects. Conclusions: The field of clinical NLP continues to thrive through the contributions of both NLP researchers and healthcare professionals interested in applying NLP techniques to impact clinical practice. Foundational progress in the field makes it possible to leverage a larger variety of texts of clinical interest for healthcare purposes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (01) ◽  
pp. 193-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurélie Névéol ◽  
Pierre Zweigenbaum ◽  

Objectives: To summarize recent research and present a selection of the best papers published in 2017 in the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Methods: A survey of the literature was performed by the two editors of the NLP section of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook. Bibliographic databases PubMed and Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) Anthology were searched for papers with a focus on NLP efforts applied to clinical texts or aimed at a clinical outcome. A total of 709 papers were automatically ranked and then manually reviewed based on title and abstract. A shortlist of 15 candidate best papers was selected by the section editors and peer-reviewed by independent external reviewers to come to the three best clinical NLP papers for 2017. Results: Clinical NLP best papers provide a contribution that ranges from methodological studies to the application of research results to practical clinical settings. They draw from text genres as diverse as clinical narratives across hospitals and languages or social media. Conclusions: Clinical NLP continued to thrive in 2017, with an increasing number of contributions towards applications compared to fundamental methods. Methodological work explores deep learning and system adaptation across language variants. Research results continue to translate into freely available tools and corpora, mainly for the English language.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (01) ◽  
pp. 228-233
Author(s):  
A. Névéol ◽  
P. Zweigenbaum

Summary Objectives: To summarize recent research and present a selection of the best papers published in 2016 in the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Method: A survey of the literature was performed by the two section editors of the IMIA Yearbook NLP section. Bibliographic databases were searched for papers with a focus on NLP efforts applied to clinical texts or aimed at a clinical outcome. Papers were automatically ranked and then manually reviewed based on titles and abstracts. A shortlist of candidate best papers was first selected by the section editors before being peer-reviewed by independent external reviewers. Results: The five clinical NLP best papers provide a contribution that ranges from emerging original foundational methods to transitioning solid established research results to a practical clinical setting. They offer a framework for abbreviation disambiguation and coreference resolution, a classification method to identify clinically useful sentences, an analysis of counseling conversations to improve support to patients with mental disorder and grounding of gradable adjectives. Conclusions: Clinical NLP continued to thrive in 2016, with an increasing number of contributions towards applications compared to fundamental methods. Fundamental work addresses increasingly complex problems such as lexical semantics, coreference resolution, and discourse analysis. Research results translate into freely available tools, mainly for English.


Author(s):  
Naga Lalitha Valli ALLA ◽  
Aipeng CHEN ◽  
Sean BATONGBACAL ◽  
Chandini NEKKANTTI ◽  
Hong-Jie Dai ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arash Maghsoudi ◽  
Sara Nowakowski ◽  
Ritwick Agrawal ◽  
Amir Sharafkhaneh ◽  
Sadaf Aram ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed additional stress on population health that may result in a higher incidence of insomnia. In this study, we hypothesized that using natural language processing (NLP) to explore social media would help to identify the mental health condition of the population experiencing insomnia after the outbreak of COVID-19. OBJECTIVE In this study, we hypothesized that using natural language processing (NLP) to explore social media would help to identify the mental health condition of the population experiencing insomnia after the outbreak of COVID-19. METHODS We designed a pre-post retrospective study using public social media content from Twitter. We categorized tweets based on time into two intervals: prepandemic (01/01/2019 to 01/01/2020) and pandemic (01/01/2020 to 01/01/2021). We used NLP to analyze polarity (positive/negative) and intensity of emotions and also users’ tweets psychological states in terms of sadness, anxiety and anger by counting the words related to these categories in each tweet. Additionally, we performed temporal analysis to examine the effect of time on the users’ insomnia experience. RESULTS We extracted 268,803 tweets containing the word insomnia (prepandemic, 123,293 and pandemic, 145,510). The odds of negative tweets (OR, 1.31; 95% CI, 1.29-1.33), anger (OR, 1.19; 95% CI, 1.16-1.21), and anxiety (OR, 1.24; 95% CI: 1.21-1.26) were higher during the pandemic compared to prepandemic. The likelihood of negative tweets after midnight was higher than for other daily intevals, comprising approximately 60% of all negative insomnia-related tweets in 2020 and 2021 collectively. CONCLUSIONS Twitter users shared more negative tweets about insomnia during the pandemic than during the year before. Also, more anger and anxiety-related content were disseminated during the pandemic on the social media platform. Future studies using an NLP framework could assess tweets about other psychological distress, habit changes, weight gain due to inactivity, and the effect of viral infection on sleep.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 3729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hei Wang ◽  
Yung Chi ◽  
Ping Hsin

With the advent of the knowledge economy, firms often compete for intellectual property rights. Being the first to acquire high-potential patents can assist firms in achieving future competitive advantages. To identify patents capable of being developed, firms often search for a focus by using existing patent documents. Because of the rapid development of technology, the number of patent documents is immense. A prominent topic among current firms is how to use this large number of patent documents to discover new business opportunities while avoiding conflicts with existing patents. In the search for technological opportunities, a crucial task is to present results in the form of an easily understood visualization. Currently, natural language processing can help in achieving this goal. In natural language processing, word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the problem of determining which “sense” (meaning) of a word is activated in a given context. Given a word and its possible senses, as defined by a dictionary, we classify the occurrence of a word in context into one or more of its sense classes. The features of the context (such as neighboring words) provide evidence for these classifications. The current method for patent document analysis warrants improvement in areas, such as the analysis of many dimensions and the development of recommendation methods. This study proposes a visualization method that supports semantics, reduces the number of dimensions formed by terms, and can easily be understood by users. Since polysemous words occur frequently in patent documents, we also propose a WSD method to decrease the calculated degrees of distortion between terms. An analysis of outlier distributions is used to construct a patent map capable of distinguishing similar patents. During the development of new strategies, the constructed patent map can assist firms in understanding patent distributions in commercial areas, thereby preventing patent infringement caused by the development of similar technologies. Subsequently, technological opportunities can be recommended according to the patent map, aiding firms in assessing relevant patents in commercial areas early and sustainably achieving future competitive advantages.


Author(s):  
Marina Sokolova ◽  
Stan Szpakowicz

This chapter presents applications of machine learning techniques to traditional problems in natural language processing, including part-of-speech tagging, entity recognition and word-sense disambiguation. People usually solve such problems without difficulty or at least do a very good job. Linguistics may suggest labour-intensive ways of manually constructing rule-based systems. It is, however, the easy availability of large collections of texts that has made machine learning a method of choice for processing volumes of data well above the human capacity. One of the main purposes of text processing is all manner of information extraction and knowledge extraction from such large text. Machine learning methods discussed in this chapter have stimulated wide-ranging research in natural language processing and helped build applications with serious deployment potential.


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