Dear Dr. Zipf,
Good day to you. My name is [name removed to protect the guilty] and I am a Ph.D. in [field removed to protect the guilty] at [a hospital which shall remain nameless]. I need to learn how to use natural language processing to process the electronic medical record and provide data that can be used for analysis. As you are an expert in this field I thought I would email you and ask for your assistance. Are there any books or training courses out there that can help me learn biomedical natural language processing in a few weeks. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Please let me know.
Warmest Regards,
[Name removed to protect the guilty]
In a few weeks… In a few weeks…
Dear Dr. X,
Biomedical natural language processing is super-simple, and I would be surprised if you couldn’t learn it in a few weeks. You might find this book helpful:
Cohen, Kevin Bretonnel, and Dina Demner-Fushman. Biomedical natural language processing. Vol. 11. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014.
Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.
Warmest Regards,
Beauregard Zipf, PhD
Dear Dr. X,
The doctoral students in our graduate program typically spend five years learning biomedical natural language processing. Personally, I’ve spent my entire career learning biomedical natural language processing, beginning with spending a number of years as a medic in the military, where I learned the “biomedical” part. I mostly did physiological monitoring–hemodynamics, electrophysiology, stuff like that. I later got a bachelor’s degree in linguistics (double major in English, actually), as well as a master’s degree in linguistics, and a PhD in linguistics, which is how I picked up the “language” part. Along the way I learned to program–the hard way, which is to say by making more mistakes than you could possibly imagine, from the painful to the just plain embarrassing. (That’s the “processing.”) Since then, I’ve spent years trying to figure this stuff out, and I still wouldn’t say that I know very much about it. But, hey, you’ve got a PhD in [redacted], so, yeah–you should be able to pick this up in a few weeks. You might find this book helpful:
Cohen, Kevin Bretonnel, and Dina Demner-Fushman. Biomedical natural language processing. Vol. 11. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014.
Warmest Regards,
Beauregard Zipf, Registered Cardiovascular Technologist, Advanced Cardiac Life Support instructor, EMT, PhD
Dear Dr. X,
- Are there any books or training courses out there that can help me learn biomedical natural language processing
Zipf
Hi, Dr. X,
Zipf
Zipf's Law 
😆 😆 😆 and PS: From now on you shall always be Beauregard to me
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Me too. There should be more Beauregards blogging out there.
Did you really get that dumb letter from Dr X? And he has PHD? I have a Dip AD, does that make me a Dipstick and Dr X just generally gormless?
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Sure did…
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Kind of hoping that you might query the adjective “gormless”…!?
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Data on “gormless” and three related words–copy and paste this into your browser:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=gormless%2Cgaumless%2Cgorm%2Cgaum&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cgormless%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bgormless%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BGormless%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cgaumless%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cgorm%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3BGorm%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bgorm%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BGORM%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cgaum%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3BGaum%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bgaum%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BGAUM%3B%2Cc0
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Oh–it turns out that you can just click on it…
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Isn’t it a compliment that your recommendation is the valorising stamp of approval on the obvious option, where he was hesitating before? (A time-wasting compliment, ok. But still a compliment.)
Beauregard, what a fabulous name. Do you go by Beau mostly? That’s a real gay romance novel hero name. As a word, it’s almost as good as ‘gormless’. Although I prefer to describe myself as ‘sans gorm’, usually.
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“Beauregard” is a stereotypical name in the US. You think of, say, a Southern gentleman–but, a buffoon of a Southern gentleman, perhaps in a Road Runner cartoon. Nonetheless: it is, indeed, a gorgeous name, and I would be only too happy to be known as “Beau” to my friends and relations. Or to anyone, really. It’s certainly not a gormless name, like my actual name!
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