Hindi Chatbot for Supporting Maternal and Child Health Related Queries in Rural India
Ritwik Mishra, Simranjeet Singh, Jasmeet Kaur, Pushpendra Singh, Rajiv Ratn Shah · 2023
In developing countries like India, doctors and healthcare professionals working in public health spend significant time answering health queries that are fact-based and repetitive.Therefore, we propose an automated way to answer maternal and child health-related queries.A database of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and their corresponding answers generated by experts is curated from rural health workers and young mothers.We develop a Hindi chatbot that identifies k relevant Question and Answer (QnA) pairs from the database in response to a healthcare query (q) written in Devnagri script or Hindi-English (Hinglish) code-mixed script.The curated database covers 80% of all the queries that a user of our study is likely to ask.We experimented with (i) rule-based methods, (ii) sentence embeddings, and (iii) a paraphrasing classifier, to calculate the q-Q similarity.We observed that paraphrasing classifier gives the best result when trained first on an open-domain text and then on the healthcare domain.Our chatbot uses an ensemble of all three approaches.We observed that if a given q can be answered using the database, then our chatbot can provide at least one relevant QnA pair among its top three suggestions for up to 70% of the queries.