Introducing information retrieval for biomedical informatics students

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.