NLP

The past year has been eventful in the fields of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). From October 3rd to 5th, 2023, John Snow Labs organized their second Natural Language Processing (NLP) Summit of the year. This event included a variety of informative presentations from both emerging start-ups and established players in the Language Model sector. This is the first part of a two-part conference write-up; it discusses trends and technologies, while the subsequent part will focus on applications in healthcare....

Today I presented a poster at the GMDS 2023 congress in Heilbronn Germany. The poster was about using Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the de-identification of semi-structured Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data. In essence we used open-source LLMs to augment our de-identification pippeline for semi-structured EMR data. The LLMs were used to identify entities that were not covered by the NER model we used. Since all of this had to be done on-site (on-premise) and with limited resources, you can probably imagine that the results were’nt stellar....

I spent the last two evenings attending John Snow Labs’ virtual “Healthcare NLP Summit,” and I found it to be a stimulating event. If you couldn’t attend, here are my notes: LLMs are all the hype Large-language-models (LLMs) were the overarching topic of the conference, and some speakers (particularly from marketing and sales) were excited about the possibilities. However, there wasn’t a clear vision of what these possibilities entailed. Senior researchers and executives had a different sentiment....