Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a research area focused on the programmatic interpretation, translation, transformation, generation, and use of unstructured textual data. Within biomedical informatics, NLP encompasses research involving information extraction from clinical notes, translation from one language or domain to another, de-identification, query generation from natural text, bias and sentiment detection, triage and classification, and many other tasks.
NLP is important because a vast amount of information related to patient care, diagnosis, and outcomes is captured only within free-text documents. Our team brings extensive experience in NLP across a range of tasks and has published numerous highly-cited research studies in high-impact biomedical journals.
Our team includes Chris Chute, MD DrPH, who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and serves as the Chief Research Informatics Officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Nic Dobbins, PhD, who leads efforts in NLP-driven cohort discovery and natural language query generation.