Natural Language Processing: Chances and Challenges in Dentistry

Natural language processing (NLP) is an intersection between Computer Science and Linguistic which aims to enable machines to process and understand human language. We here summarized applications and limitations of NLP in dentistry.

Narrative review.

NLP has evolved increasingly fast. For the dental domain, relevant NLP applications are text classification (e.g., symptom classification) and natural language generation and understanding (e.g., clinical chatbots assisting professionals in office work and patient communication). Analyzing large quantities of text will allow understanding diseases and their trajectories and support a more precise and personalized care. Speech recognition systems may serve as virtual assistants and facilitate automated documentation. However, to date, NLP has rarely been applied in dentistry. Existing research focuses mainly on rule-based solutions for narrow tasks. Technologies such as Recurrent Neural Networks and Transformers have been shown to surpass the language processing capabilities of such rule-based solutions in many fields, but are data-hungry (i.e., rely on large amounts of training data), which limits their application in the dental domain at present. Technologies such as federated or transfer learning or data sharing concepts may allow to overcome this limitation, while challenges in terms of explainability, reproducibility, generalizability and evaluation of NLP in dentistry remain to be resolved for enabling approval of such technologies in medical devices and services.

NLP will become a cornerstone of a number of applications in dentistry. The community is called to action to improve the current limitations and foster reliable, high-quality dental NLP.

NLP for text classification (e.g., dental symptom classification) and language generation and understanding (e.g., clinical chatbots, speech recognition) will support administrative tasks in dentistry, provide deeper insights for clinicians and support research and education.