Combining CNNs and Pattern Matching for Question Interpretation in a Virtual Patient Dialogue System

Lifeng Jin, Michael White, Evan Jaffe, Laura Zimmerman, Douglas Danforth


Abstract
For medical students, virtual patient dialogue systems can provide useful training opportunities without the cost of employing actors to portray standardized patients. This work utilizes word- and character-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for question identification in a virtual patient dialogue system, outperforming a strong word- and character-based logistic regression baseline. While the CNNs perform well given sufficient training data, the best system performance is ultimately achieved by combining CNNs with a hand-crafted pattern matching system that is robust to label sparsity, providing a 10% boost in system accuracy and an error reduction of 47% as compared to the pattern-matching system alone.
Anthology ID:
W17-5002
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Joel Tetreault, Jill Burstein, Claudia Leacock, Helen Yannakoudakis
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–21
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5002
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-5002
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lifeng Jin, Michael White, Evan Jaffe, Laura Zimmerman, and Douglas Danforth. 2017. Combining CNNs and Pattern Matching for Question Interpretation in a Virtual Patient Dialogue System. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 11–21, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Combining CNNs and Pattern Matching for Question Interpretation in a Virtual Patient Dialogue System (Jin et al., BEA 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5002.pdf