Abstract
Medical dialogue systems interact with patients to collect symptoms and provide treatment advice. In this task, medical entities (e.g., diseases, symptoms, and medicines) are the most central part of the dialogues. However, existing datasets either do not provide entity annotation or are too small in scale. In this paper, we present MedDG, an entity-centric medical dialogue dataset, where medical entities are annotated with the help of domain experts. It consists of 17,864 Chinese dialogues, 385,951 utterances, and 217,205 entities, at least one magnitude larger than existing entity-annotated datasets. Based on MedDG, we conduct preliminary research on entity-aware medical dialogue generation by implementing several benchmark models. Extensive experiments show that the entity-aware adaptions on the generation models consistently enhance the response quality but there still remains a large space of improvement for future research. The codes and the dataset are released at https://github.com/lwgkzl/MedDG.
W. Liu, J. Tang, and Y. Cheng—Equal contribution.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
References
McCall, B: Could telemedicine solve the cancer backlog? The Lancet Digital Health (2020)
Liu, W., Tang, J., Liang, X., Cai, Q.: Heterogeneous graph reasoning for knowledge-grounded medical dialogue system. Neurocomputing 442, 260–268 (2021)
Zeng, G., et al.: MedDialog: large-scale medical dialogue datasets. In Proceedings of EMNLP, pp. 9241–9250 (2020)
Lin, X., He, X., Chen, Q., Tou, H., Wei, Z., Chen, T.: Enhancing dialogue symptom diagnosis with global attention and symptom graph. In Proceedings of EMNLP, pp. 5032–5041. Association for Computational Linguistics (2019)
Zhang, Y., et al.: MIE: a medical information extractor towards medical dialogues. In Proceedings of ACL, pp. 6460–6469 (2020)
Xu, L., Zhou, Q., Gong, K., Liang, X., Tang, J., Lin, L.: End-to-end knowledge-routed relational dialogue system for automatic diagnosis. In Proceedings of AAAI, pp. 7346–7353 (2019)
Wei, Z., et al.: Task-oriented dialogue system for automatic diagnosis. In Proceedings of ACL, pp. 201–207 (2018)
Lin, X., He, X., Chen, Q., Tou, H., Wei, Z., Chen, T.: Enhancing dialogue symptom diagnosis with global attention and symptom graph. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), Hong Kong, China, Nov 2019, pp. 5033–5042. Association for Computational Linguistics (2019)
Du, N., Wang, M., Tran, L., Lee, G., Shafran, I.: Learning to infer entities, properties and their relations from clinical conversations. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pp. 4979–4990, Hong Kong, China, Nov 2019. Association for Computational Linguistics (2019)
Shi, X., Hu, H., Che, W., Sun, Z., Liu, T., Huang, J.: Understanding medical conversations with scattered keyword attention and weak supervision from responses. In Proceedings of AAAI, pp. 8838–8845 (2020)
Ferguson, G., Allen, J., Galescu, L., Quinn, J., Swift, M.: CARDIAC: an intelligent conversational assistant for chronic heart failure patient heath monitoring. In 2009 AAAI Fall Symposium Series (2009)
Wong, W., Thangarajah, J., Padgham, L.: Health conversational system based on contextual matching of community-driven question-answer pairs. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 2577–2580 (2011)
Liu, C., et al.: Augmented LSTM framework to construct medical self-diagnosis android. In ICKM, pp. 251–260. IEEE (2016)
Liu, W., et al.: “My nose is running” “are you also coughing”: building a medical diagnosis agent with interpretable inquiry logics. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.13953 (2022)
Odmaa, B., et al.: Preliminary study on the construction of Chinese medical knowledge graph. J. Chin. Inf. Process. 33(10), 1–7 (2019)
Hochreiter, S., Schmidhuber, J.: Long short-term memory. Neural Comput. 9(8), 1735–1780 (1997)
Kim, Y.: Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Doha, Qatar, Oct 2014, pp. 1746–1751. Association for Computational Linguistics (2014)
Cui, Y., et al.: Pre-training with whole word masking for Chinese BERT. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.08101 (2019)
Ting, L., Bing, Q., Ming, L., Ruifeng, X., Buzhou, T., Qingcai, C.: Pre-training model for Chinese medical text processing-PCL-MedBERT. In: PCL blog (2020)
Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O., Le, Q.V.: Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 3104–3112 (2014)
Serban, I.V., Sordoni, A., Bengio, Y., Courville, A.C., Pineau, J.: Building end-to-end dialogue systems using generative hierarchical neural network models. In: Proceedings of AAAI, pp. 3776–3784 (2016)
Radford, A., Wu, J., Child, R., Luan, D., Amodei, D., Sutskever, I.: Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. In: OpenAI Blog (2019)
Zhang, Y., et al.: DIALOGPT: large-scale generative pre-training for conversational response generation. In: Proceedings of ACL: System Demonstrations, pp. 270–278. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)
Chen, B., Cherry, C.: A systematic comparison of smoothing techniques for sentence-level BLEU. In: Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, pp. 362–367 (2014)
Li, J., Galley, M., Brockett, C., Gao, J., Dolan, B.: A diversity-promoting objective function for neural conversation models. In: Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, pp. 110–119. Association for Computational Linguistics (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Liu, W., Tang, J., Cheng, Y., Li, W., Zheng, Y., Liang, X. (2022). MedDG: An Entity-Centric Medical Consultation Dataset for Entity-Aware Medical Dialogue Generation. In: Lu, W., Huang, S., Hong, Y., Zhou, X. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13551. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17120-8_35
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17120-8_35
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-17119-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-17120-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)