MedConQA: Medical Conversational Question Answering System based on Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

The medical conversational system can relieve doctors' burden and improve healthcare effi-ciency, especially during the COVID-19 pan-demic. However, the existing medical dialogue systems have die problems of weak scalability, insufficient knowledge, and poor controlla-bility. Thus, we propose a medical conversa-tional question-answering (CQA) system based on the knowledge graph, namely MedConQA, which is designed as a pipeline framework to maintain high flexibility. Our system utilizes automated medical procedures, including medi-cal triage, consultation, image-text drug recom-mendation, and record. Each module has been open-sourced as a tool, which can be used alone or in combination, with robust scalability. Besides, to conduct knowledge-grounded dia-logues with users, we first construct a Chinese Medical Knowledge Graph (CMKG) and col-lect a large-scale Chinese Medical CQA (CM-CQA) dataset, and we design a series of meth-ods for reasoning more intellectually. Finally, we use several state-of-the-art (SOTA) tech-niques to keep the final generated response more controllable, which is further assured by hospital and professional evaluations. We have open-sourced related code, datasets, web pages, and tools, hoping to advance future research.