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BMI 6330 Biomedical Natural Language Processing

3 semester credit hours
Lecture contact hours: 2; Lab contact hours: 3
Web-based and classroom instruction
Prerequisite: Consent of instructor

Course Description:
This course focuses on current natural language processing (NLP) methods and their applications in the biomedical domain. It is a project-based student-driven course while also providing a systematic introduction to basic NLP concepts and methods, especially with a biomedical focus. Students will gain knowledge and skills in various NLP tasks such as named entity recognition, information extraction, and information retrieval.

Prior to enrollment in the course, students are required to select and prepare a research project. This includes both having direct access to the raw text data as well as high-level goals for the NLP task. Please contact the instructor with questions and pointers to potential data sources. Students will be expected to manually annotate this data, create an automatic machine learning-based NLP system, and write a paper describing their results.

Upon successful completion of the course, students will:

  • Analyze text data using different levels of linguistic knowledge
  • Explain the differences between biomedical NLP and general NLP
  • Describe the system architecture and the state-of-the-art methods for the major topics in NLP domain: information extraction, text classification, information retrieval, question answering and sentimental analysis
  • Design NLP systems and evaluate their performance
  • Apply data-driven and machine learning algorithms to solve biomedical natural language processing problems
  • Use existing biomedical resources and biomedical NLP systems to conduct biomedical research