Introducing Information Retrieval for Biomedical Informatics Students

TL;DR

This paper presents educational activities that teach biomedical informatics students about information retrieval and NLP techniques, including document representation and language models, through practical, hands-on exercises.

Contribution

It introduces a set of activities designed to teach BMI students core NLP concepts and workflows with a focus on practical application and understanding.

Findings

Students gain hands-on experience with NLP techniques.

Activities cover document representation and language models from TF-IDF to BERT.

The approach bridges theoretical knowledge and practical skills in biomedical informatics.

Abstract

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.