The course will be based around practical examples and widely used Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools.
The course aims to provide an introduction to the major techniques of natural language processing, and to provide participants with the skills to create their own NLP applications, using both rules based and statistical approaches. Methods will be introduced for extracting structured information from text, and for automatically classifying text, together with the selection of data for training and for evaluation.
The course will discuss aspects of NLP that are specific to medical and biomedical texts, and develop a critical awareness of the issues associated with these texts. Participants will be equipped with the skills needed to analyse their own language processing problems, to design and test solutions, and to understand the limitations of those solutions.
The course will provide a practical instruction in the use of some widely used tools in NLP, including nltk (a Python toolkit).