John Snow Labs is making its licensed libraries for state-of-the-art natural language processing – Spark NLP for Healthcare and Spark OCR – available under a free license for academic researchers, educators, and students. This includes over 1,000 pre-trained models as well as the entire catalog of over 2,220 expert-curated datasets in its Data Library.

You can get a free personal license if you are doing academic research that will be publicly published under open-access, open-source, and open-data principles. If you are teaching a course that makes use of the library, you and your students can get a free license for it. We can also provide you with learning materials – from Python notebooks to slides & exercises.

The free license includes the full capabilities of the software, all pre-trained models, and regular updates. Its goal is to enable you to easily reuse, reproduce, and improve production-grade, state-of-the-art NLP in your research & teaching.

Fill in the form to apply for your free license. Please use your university’s email address and briefly explain how you will use the academic license. If you have more questions, feel free to reply to this email with your questions or proposed times for a call.

Spark NLP for Healthcare gives you access to state-of-the-art:

• Clinical named entity recognition – train your own or use pre-trained models to extract clinical facts (symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, procedures), drug facts (name, strength, dosage, route, frequency, duration), and biomedical terms (organism, tissue, gene, gene product, chemical, …).
• Assertion status detection – telling between positive assertions (“patient has diabetes”), negative assertions (“no fever”), uncertain assertions (“shows indications of depression”), or assertions about other people (“family history of lung cancer”).
• Entity resolution – train your own or use pre-trained models to resolve recognized entities to SNOMED-CT, ICD-10-CM, ICD-10-PCS, CPT, or RxNorm.
• De-identification – Anonymize either structured tables or unstructured free text including all GDPR and HIPAA-required fields as well as and then either remove, mask, or obfuscate PHI.
• Relation extraction – use pre-trained models to automatically identify relations between entities such as drugs, dosage, duration, frequency, clinical events among many others.

Spark OCR allows you to accurately transform PDF and image files to digital text with built-in algorithms for:

• image pre-processing (binarization, thresholding, erosion, scaling, skew correction),
• image cleansing (noise scorer, remove objects, morphology), and
• handling of complex document layouts (LayoutAnalyzer, SplitRegions, DrawRegions, PositionFinder).

The Data Library includes over 2,200 expert-curated datasets that are ready to download and use on your academic/research project:

• Each dataset goes through 3 levels of quality review
• Data is normalized into one unified type system
• Data and Metadata
• Data Updates

Our company is named after Dr. John Snow – the medical doctor who helped stop the outbreak of cholera in 1854 London by analyzing data. We exist for the very purpose of empowering many more like him in the 21st century.