Medical Dialogue Generation via Dual Flow Modeling

Kaishuai Xu, Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Jian Wang, Wenjie Li


Abstract
Medical dialogue systems (MDS) aim to provide patients with medical services, such as diagnosis and prescription. Since most patients cannot precisely describe their symptoms, dialogue understanding is challenging for MDS. Previous studies mainly addressed this by extracting the mentioned medical entities as critical dialogue history information. In this work, we argue that it is also essential to capture the transitions of the medical entities and the doctor’s dialogue acts in each turn, as they help the understanding of how the dialogue flows and enhance the prediction of the entities and dialogue acts to be adopted in the following turn. Correspondingly, we propose a Dual Flow enhanced Medical (DFMed) dialogue generation framework. It extracts the medical entities and dialogue acts used in the dialogue history and models their transitions with an entity-centric graph flow and a sequential act flow, respectively. We employ two sequential models to encode them and devise an interweaving component to enhance their interactions. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our method exceeds baselines in both automatic and manual evaluations.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.423
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6771–6784
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.423
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.423
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kaishuai Xu, Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Jian Wang, and Wenjie Li. 2023. Medical Dialogue Generation via Dual Flow Modeling. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 6771–6784, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Medical Dialogue Generation via Dual Flow Modeling (Xu et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.423.pdf