Before her doctoral degree, working under the direction of Naomi Sager at New York University, she also contributed to the development of second generation medical language processing systems.
After her doctoral degree in computer science (natural language processing) under Dr. Ralph Grishman at the Courant Institute of Mathematics at New York University, she has developed annotative clinical information systems that have been integrated in the New York–Presbyterian Hospital, and the Columbia University Medical Center.
She is recognized for her development, translation to clinical practice and evaluation of the MedLEE[3] medical language processing system.
MedLEE and GENIES exemplify the translation to practice of the sub-language theory proposed by Zellig Harris that Friedman pursued.
In summary, she has been demonstrating the value of natural language processing for a broad range of clinical and biomedical applications that include decision support, automated encoding, vocabulary development, sub-language grammar applied to biomedicine, clinical research, outcomes analysis, error detection, and genomics research.