Challenges of Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing: A Healthcare-Oriented Perspective

Abstract

In recent years, natural language processing has become an important tool in healthcare for extracting useful information from unstructured clinical text such as electronic health records, physician notes, and medical literature. Deep learning has significantly improved the performance of NLP systems, enabling stronger results in tasks such as disease prediction, clinical decision support, and patient risk assessment. However, healthcare NLP still faces major challenges in real-world deployment. Clinical text is often noisy, fragmented, and inconsistent, which can reduce model reliability. In addition, deep learning models lack transparency, which limits their adoption by clinicians who require explainable outputs for clinical decision-making. Privacy and security also remain major barriers because patient data is highly sensitive and subject to strict legal and ethical requirements. Bias in training data can further lead to uneven performance across patient populations. This paper combines a literature review with a healthcare-oriented case study to examine these issues in real-world settings. The findings show that although deep learning offers strong potential for healthcare analytics, progress depends on solving problems related to data quality, interpretability, privacy, and domain adaptation.