Practical Natural Language Processing

Chapter 10. Healthcare, Finance, and Law

Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO

NLP is affecting and improving all major industries and sectors. In the last two chapters, we covered how NLP is being utilized in the e-commerce, retail, and social media sectors. In this chapter, we’ll cover three major industries where the impact of NLP is rapidly increasing to have a substantial influence on the global economy: healthcare, finance, and law. We’ve chosen these areas to demonstrate a wide range of problems, solutions, and challenges you might face in your organization.

The term healthcare encompasses all goods and services for maintenance and improvement of health and well-being. It’s estimated to be worth over 10 trillion dollars as a market globally and accounts for tens of millions of people in the workforce [1]. The financial industry is one of the bedrocks of modern civilization and is estimated to be worth over 26.5 trillion dollars. The legal services industry is estimated to be worth over 850 billion dollars annually and is projected to cross a trillion dollars by 2021.

In this first section, we’ll start with an overview of the healthcare industry. Then we’ll cover broad applications in the healthcare landscape, along with a detailed discussion of specific use cases.

Healthcare

Healthcare as an industry encompasses both goods (i.e., medicines and equipment) and services (consultation or diagnostic testing) for curative, ...