Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine:
A Practical Guide

This first edition of "Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine: A Practical Guide", edited by Hua Xu and Dina Demner-Fushman, has been published by Springer Nature in their Cognitive Informatics in Health and Medicine book series. This textbook covers broad topics within the application of natural language processing (NLP) in biomedicine and provides in-depth review of the NLP solutions that reveal information embedded in biomedical text. The need for biomedical NLP research and development has grown rapidly in the past two decades as an important field in cognitive informatics. The book introduces the history of the biomedical NLP field and takes the reader through the basic aspects of NLP including different levels of linguistic information widely used machine learning and deep learning algorithms, and recent advances on large language models (LLMs). It also details common biomedical NLP tasks, such as named entity recognition, concept normalization, relation extraction, text classification, information retrieval, and question answering, with real-life use cases and real-world datasets. Relevant resources for corpora and medical terminologies are also introduced. The final chapters are devoted to discussing applications of biomedical NLP in healthcare and life sciences. This textbook therefore represents essential reading for students in biomedical informatics programs, as well as for professionals who are conducting research or building biomedical NLP systems.

Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine: A Practical Guide

Hua Xu, PhD, Yale University, New Haven, CT

Dina Demner-Fushman, MD, PhD, Computational Health Research Branch, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD