Dialogue Medical Information Extraction with Medical-Item Graph and Dialogue-Status Enriched Representation

Lei Gao, Xinnan Zhang, Xian Wu, Shen Ge, Yefeng Zheng

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper

Submission Track: NLP Applications

Keywords: Dialogue medical information extraction, Multi-label text classification, Graph neural network, Natural language processing

TL;DR: Extracting medical item status pairs from patient doctor conversations with GNN

Abstract: The multi-turn doctor-patient dialogue includes rich medical knowledge, like the symptoms of the patient, the diagnosis and medication suggested by the doctor. If mined and represented properly, such medical knowledge can benefit a large range of clinical applications, including diagnosis assistance and medication recommendation. To derive structured knowledge from free text dialogues, we target a critical task: the Dialogue Medical Information Extraction (DMIE). DMIE aims to detect pre-defined clinical meaningful medical items (symptoms, surgery, etc.) as well as their statuses (positive, negative, etc.) from the dialogue. Existing approaches mainly formulate DMIE as a multi-label classification problem and ignore the relationships among medical items and statuses. Different from previous approaches, we propose a heterogeneous graph to model the relationship between items. We further propose two consecutive attention based modules to enrich the item representation with the dialogue and status. In this manner, we are able to model the relationships among medical items and statuses in the DMIE task. Experimental results on the public benchmark data set show that the proposed model outperforms previous works and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Submission Number: 5537