Dual-process system based on mixed semantic fusion for Chinese medical knowledge-based question answering

Abstract

Chinese medical knowledge-based question answering (cMed-KBQA) is a vital component of the intelligence question-answering assignment. Its purpose is to enable the model to comprehend questions and then deduce the proper answer from the knowledge base. Previous methods solely considered how questions and knowledge base paths were represented, disregarding their significance. Due to entity and path sparsity, the performance of question and answer cannot be effectively enhanced. To address this challenge, this paper presents a structured methodology for the cMed-KBQA based on the cognitive science dual systems theory by synchronizing an observation stage (System 1) and an expressive reasoning stage (System 2). System 1 learns the question’s representation and queries the associated simple path. Then System 2 retrieves complicated paths for the question from the knowledge base by using the simple path provided by System 1. Specifically, System 1 is implemented by the entity extraction module, entity linking module, simple path retrieval module, and simple path-matching model. Meanwhile, System 2 is performed by using the complex path retrieval module and complex path-matching model. The public CKBQA2019 and CKBQA2020 datasets were extensively studied to evaluate the suggested technique. Using the metric average F1-score, our model achieved 78.12% on CKBQA2019 and 86.60% on CKBQA2020.