Natural language processing

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that is concerned with the automatic understanding of human language by computers. NLP has seen much success in recent years due to increased computing power and the rise of deep learning, and this success has extended into the domains of biomedical and clinical text. NLP has contributed to tasks such as the discovery of drug interactions, the development of clinical decision support systems, and the facilitation of chart review. Part I of this chapter provides an introduction to NLP, some common tasks in the biomedical domain, and the methods for accomplishing these tasks. Part II gives a survey of recent applications of NLP in cardiovascular medicine.