A Review of Recent Work in Transfer Learning and Domain Adaptation for Natural Language Processing of Electronic Health Records.

While pre-trained transformer models have led to some large performance improvements, general domain pre-training does not always transfer adequately to the clinical domain due to its highly specialized language. There is also much work to be done in showing that the gains obtained by pre-trained transformers are beneficial in real world use cases. The amount of work in domain adaptation and transfer learning is limited by dataset availability and creating datasets for new domains is challenging. The growing body of research in languages other than English is encouraging, and more collaboration between researchers across the language divide would likely accelerate progress in non-English clinical NLP.