Introducing Information Retrieval for Biomedical Informatics Students
This work addresses the educational needs of biomedical informatics students by introducing NLP fundamentals in an application-focused manner, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods for teaching purposes.
The authors tackled the challenge of teaching natural language processing to biomedical informatics students by developing three hands-on activities covering document representation and language models from TF-IDF to BERT, providing practical experience for common use cases.
Introducing biomedical informatics (BMI) students to natural language processing (NLP) requires balancing technical depth with practical know-how to address application-focused needs. We developed a set of three activities introducing introductory BMI students to information retrieval with NLP, covering document representation strategies and language models from TF-IDF to BERT. These activities provide students with hands-on experience targeted towards common use cases, and introduce fundamental components of NLP workflows for a wide variety of applications.