MKA: A Scalable Medical Knowledge Assisted Mechanism for Generative Models on Medical Conversation Tasks

TL;DR

This paper introduces MKA, a scalable mechanism that integrates medical knowledge graphs into neural generative models to improve medical conversation quality, achieving state-of-the-art results on relevant datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel Medical Knowledge Assisted mechanism that effectively incorporates medical knowledge into generative models for healthcare chatbots.

Findings

Models with MKA outperform baselines on automatic metrics.

MKA-Bert-GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance.

The mechanism improves medical dialogue generation quality.

Abstract

Using natural language processing (NLP) technologies to develop medical chatbots makes the diagnosis of the patient more convenient and efficient, which is a typical application in healthcare AI. Because of its importance, lots of research have been come out. Recently, the neural generative models have shown their impressive ability as the core of chatbot, while it cannot scale well when directly applied to medical conversation due to the lack of medical-specific knowledge. To address the limitation, a scalable Medical Knowledge Assisted mechanism, MKA, is proposed in this paper. The mechanism aims to assist general neural generative models to achieve better performance on the medical conversation task. The medical-specific knowledge graph is designed within the mechanism, which contains 6 types of medical-related information, including department, drug, check, symptom, disease, food. Besides, the specific token concatenation policy is defined to effectively inject medical information into the input data. Evaluation of our method is carried out on two typical medical datasets, MedDG and MedDialog-CN. The evaluation results demonstrate that models combined with our mechanism outperform original methods in multiple automatic evaluation metrics. Besides, MKA-Bert-GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance. The open-sourced codes are public: https://github.com/LIANGKE23/Knowledge_Assisted_Medical_Dialogue_Generation_Mechanism