Medical Term and Status Generation From Chinese Clinical Dialogue With Multi-Granularity Transformer
Mei Li, Lu Xiang, Xiaomian Kang, Yang Zhao, Zhou Yu, Chengqing Zong · IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing · 2021
This paper describes a generative model for extracting medical terms and their status from Chinese medical dialogues. Notably, the extracted semantic information plays an essential role in downstream tasks such as automatic medical scribe and automatic diagnosis system. However, how to effectively leverage dialogue context to generate medical terms and their corresponding status accurately remains less explored. Existing generative methods treat dialogue text as concentrated long text without considering the characteristics of conversation, such as colloquialism, redundancy, interactions, etc. Various colloquial medical information is frequently discussed between doctor and patient. Each of the speakers (doctor and patient) plays a specific role in the goals of interaction. Thus the role information and interactions between utterances are vital. Besides, current generative methods only utilize character-level tokens ignoring the word-level tokens, which is the smallest meaningful utterance in Chinese. In this paper, we propose a Multi-granularity Transformer (MGT) model to enhance the dialogue context understanding from multi-granularity features. We introduce word-level information by adapting a Lattice-based encoder with our proposed relative position encoding method. We further introduce utterance-level interaction information by proposing a Role Access Controlled Attention (RaCa) mechanism. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets illustrate our model's validity and effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.