PlugMed: Improving Specificity in Patient-Centered Medical Dialogue Generation using In-Context Learning

Chengfeng Dou, Zhi Jin, Wenpin Jiao, Haiyan Zhao, Yongqiang Zhao, Zhengwei Tao


Abstract
The patient-centered medical dialogue systems strive to offer diagnostic interpretation services to users who are less knowledgeable about medical knowledge, through emphasizing the importance of providing responses specific to the patients. It is difficult for the large language models (LLMs) to guarantee the specificity of responses in spite of its promising performance even in some tasks in medical field. Inspired by in-context learning, we propose PlugMed, a Plug-and-Play Medical Dialogue System, for addressing this challenge. PlugMed is equipped with two modules, the prompt generation (PG) module and the response ranking (RR) module, to enhances LLMs’ dialogue strategies for improving the specificity of the dialogue. The PG module is designed to stimulate the imitative ability of LLMs by providing them with real dialogues from similar patients as prompts. The RR module incorporates fine-tuned small model as response filter to enable the selection of appropriate responses generated by LLMs. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation method based on matching both user’s intent and high-frequency medical term to effectively assess the specificity of the responses. We conduct experimental evaluations on three medical dialogue datasets, and the results, including both automatic and human evaluation, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.336
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5050–5066
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.336
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.336
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chengfeng Dou, Zhi Jin, Wenpin Jiao, Haiyan Zhao, Yongqiang Zhao, and Zhengwei Tao. 2023. PlugMed: Improving Specificity in Patient-Centered Medical Dialogue Generation using In-Context Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 5050–5066, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PlugMed: Improving Specificity in Patient-Centered Medical Dialogue Generation using In-Context Learning (Dou et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.336.pdf