Natural Language Processing (NLP) Service

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a type of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, for extracting structured information from the free text of electronic health records. We have set up the CRIS NLP Service to facilitate the extraction of anonymised information from the free text of the clinical record at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.

Research using data from electronic health records (EHRs) is rapidly increasing and most of the valuable information is sought in the free text. However, manually reviewing the free text is very time consuming. To overcome the burden of manual work and extract the information needed, NLP methods are utilised and in high demand throughout the research world.

Jaya Chaturvedi is a postdoctoral researcher in health-related natural language processing at the Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics at King’s College London. Watch the below video to hear her talk about the uses and importance of free text clinical data in healthcare research, the many challenges of working with such data, and the different NLP tools and approaches that can be used to assist in the analysis of this data, thereby aiding health research and care.

CRIS NLP Applications Library

The document published and regularly updated here contains the details and performance of over 80 NLP applications relating to the automatic extraction of mental health data from the EHR that we have developed and currently routinely deployed through our NLP service.

Current (2026)

CRIS Natural Language Processing Applications Library (2026), v3.8