In a compelling new article, Dr. John Halamka and Paul Cerrato unpack how natural language processing (NLP) is transforming healthcare—turning complex human communication into data machines can analyze, learn from, and act on. From summarizing dense health records to powering ChatGPT, NLP’s blend of computational linguistics and deep learning is quietly reshaping how medicine interacts with technology.
But how exactly do machines interpret figurative phrases or reorder grammar across languages? The answer lies in the science of transformers and self-attention—and it’s more intuitive than you might think.