Medical Entity Relation Verification with Large-scale Machine Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Medical entity relation verification is a crucial step to build a practical and enterprise medical knowledge graph (MKG) because high-precision medical entity relation is a key requirement for many MKG-based applications. Existing relation verification approaches for general knowledge graphs are not designed for considering medical domain knowledge, although it is central to achieve high-quality entity relation verification for MKG. To this end, in this paper, we introduce a system for medical entity relation verification with large-scale machine reading comprehension. The proposed system is tailored to overcome the unique challenges of medical relation verification including high variants of medical terms, the high difficulty of evidence searching in complex medical documents, and the lack of evidence labels for supervision. To deal with the problem of variants of medical terms, we introduce a synonym-aware retrieve model to retrieve the potential evidence implicitly verifying the given claim. To better utilize the medical domain knowledge, a relation-aware evidence detector and a medical ontology-enhanced aggregator are developed to improve the performance of the relation verification module. Moreover, to overcome the challenge of providing high-quality evidence due to the lack of labels, we introduce an interactive collaborative-training method to iteratively improve the evidence accuracy. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that the performance of our proposed system is superior to all comparable models. We also demonstrate that our system can significantly reduce the annotation time by medical experts in real-world verification tasks. It can help to improve the efficiency by nearly 300%. In particular, our system has been embedded into the Baidu Clinical Decision Support System.