Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Techniques Help Achieve a Better Medical Practice

Abstract

This book chapter presents several natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques that can help achieve a better medical practice by means of extracting relevant medical information from the wealth of textual data. The chapter describes three major tasks: building intelligent tools that can help in the clinical decision making, tools that can automatically identify relevant medical information from the life-science literature, and tools that can extract semantic relations between medical concepts. Besides introducing and describing these tasks, methodological settings accompanied by representative results obtained on real-life data sets are presented.