Most medical dialogue systems assume that patients have clear goals (seeking a diagnosis, medicine querying, etc.) before medical consultation. However, in many real situations, due to the lack of medical knowledge, it is usually difficult for patients to determine clear goals with all necessary slots. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct medical consultation dialogue systems to help patients clarify their goals. For further study, we create a novel human-to-human mixed-type medical consultation dialogue corpus, termed MidMed, covering four dialogue types: task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, recommendation, QA, and chitchat. MidMed covers four departments (otorhinolaryngology, ophthalmology, skin, and digestive system), with 8,309 dialogues. Furthermore, we build benchmarking baselines on MidMed and propose an instruction-guiding medical dialogue generation framework, termed InsMed, to handle mixed-type dialogues. Experimental results show the effectiveness of InsMed.

In this paper, we describe two systems we developed for the three tracks we have participated in the BEA-2019 GEC Shared Task. We investigate competitive classification models with bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN) and neural machine translation (NMT) models. For different tracks, we use ensemble systems to selectively combine the NMT models, the classification models, and some rules, and demonstrate that an ensemble solution can effectively improve GEC performance over single systems. Our GEC systems ranked the first in the Unrestricted Track, and the third in both the Restricted Track and the Low Resource Track.

This paper presents the first AMR parser built on the Chinese AMR bank. By applying a transition-based AMR parsing framework to Chinese, we first investigate how well the transitions first designed for English AMR parsing generalize to Chinese and provide a comparative analysis between the transitions for English and Chinese. We then perform a detailed error analysis to identify the major challenges in Chinese AMR parsing that we hope will inform future research in this area.

This paper proposes to tackle the AMR parsing bottleneck by improving two components of an AMR parser: concept identification and alignment. We first build a Bidirectional LSTM based concept identifier that is able to incorporate richer contextual information to learn sparse AMR concept labels. We then extend an HMM-based word-to-concept alignment model with graph distance distortion and a rescoring method during decoding to incorporate the structural information in the AMR graph. We show integrating the two components into an existing AMR parser results in consistently better performance over the state of the art on various datasets.

Neural attention models have achieved great success in different NLP tasks. However, they have not fulfilled their promise on the AMR parsing task due to the data sparsity issue. In this paper, we describe a sequence-to-sequence model for AMR parsing and present different ways to tackle the data sparsity problem. We show that our methods achieve significant improvement over a baseline neural attention model and our results are also competitive against state-of-the-art systems that do not use extra linguistic resources.