Enhancing dialogue symptom diagnosis with global attention and symptom graph

Abstract

Symptom diagnosis is a challenging yet profound problem in natural language processing. Most previous research focus on investigating the standard electronic medical records for symptom diagnosis, while the dialogues between doctors and patients that contain more rich information are not well studied. In this paper, we first construct a dialogue symptom diagnosis dataset based on an online medical forum with a large amount of dialogues between patients and doctors. Then, we provide some benchmark models on this dataset to boost the research of dialogue symptom diagnosis. In order to further enhance the performance of symptom diagnosis over dialogues, we propose a global attention mechanism to capture more symptom related information, and build a symptom graph to model the associations between symptoms rather than treating each symptom independently. Experimental results show that both the global attention and symptom graph are effective to boost dialogue symptom diagnosis. In particular, our proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the constructed dataset.