Year 2021: COVID-19, Information Extraction and BERTization among the Hottest Topics in Medical Natural Language...

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Natural Language Processing

Background:

• Medical Natural Language Processing (NLP) is crucial for extracting insights from clinical text.
• The year 2021 saw significant advancements and shifts in NLP research within the medical domain.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the content and key themes of medical NLP publications in 2021.
• To identify the best performing NLP papers and emerging research trends.

Main Methods:

• A comprehensive review of medical NLP publications from 2021.
• Both automatic and manual methods were employed for preselection and final paper selection.
• Content analysis was performed on selected publications to identify important issues.

Main Results:

• Four outstanding NLP papers were identified for 2021.
• A detailed analysis revealed the primary research topics and trends in the field.
• Key areas included COVID-19 related research and the application of transformer models.

Conclusions:

• The dominant research themes in 2021 were COVID-19 inquiries and the adaptation of transformer models.
• Continuing trends from previous years include information extraction and leveraging social network data.
• Medical NLP research in 2021 demonstrated a strong focus on immediate health crises and advanced AI techniques.