Hindi Chatbot for Supporting Maternal and Child Health Related Queries in Rural India

Ritwik Mishra, Simranjeet Singh, Jasmeet Kaur, Pushpendra Singh, Rajiv Shah


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2023.clinicalnlp-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Tristan Naumann, Asma Ben Abacha, Steven Bethard, Kirk Roberts, Anna Rumshisky
Venue:
ClinicalNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
69–77
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.clinicalnlp-1.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.clinicalnlp-1.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ritwik Mishra, Simranjeet Singh, Jasmeet Kaur, Pushpendra Singh, and Rajiv Shah. 2023. Hindi Chatbot for Supporting Maternal and Child Health Related Queries in Rural India. In Proceedings of the 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 69–77, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hindi Chatbot for Supporting Maternal and Child Health Related Queries in Rural India (Mishra et al., ClinicalNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.clinicalnlp-1.9.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.clinicalnlp-1.9.mp4