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On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19
ACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
  • Meng Zhou, University of California, San Diego
  • Zechen Li, University of California, San Diego
  • Bowen Tan, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Guangtao Zeng, University of California, San Diego
  • Wenmian Yang, University of California, San Diego
  • Xuehai He, University of California, San Diego
  • Zeqian Ju, University of California, San Diego
  • Subrato Chakravorty, University of California, San Diego
  • Shu Chen, University of California, San Diego
  • Xingyi Yang, University of California, San Diego
  • Yichen Zhang, University of California, San Diego
  • Qingyang Wu, University of California, San Diego
  • Zhou Yu, Columbia University
  • Kun Xu, Tencent
  • Eric Xing, Carnegie Mellon University & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • Pengtao Xie, University of California, San Diego
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Abstract

Under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVID19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. Because of the shortage of medical professionals, many people cannot receive online consultations timely. To address this problem, we aim to develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations. We collected two dialog datasets - CovidDialog - (in English and Chinese respectively) containing conversations between doctors and patients about COVID-19. While the largest of their kind, these two datasets are still relatively small compared with generaldomain dialog datasets. Training complex dialog generation models on small datasets bears high risk of overfitting. To alleviate overfitting, we develop a multi-task learning approach, which regularizes the data-deficient dialog generation task with a masked token prediction task. Experiments on the CovidDialog datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We perform both human evaluation and automatic evaluation of dialogs generated by our method. Results show that the generated responses are promising in being doctorlike, relevant to conversation history, clinically informative and correct.

Publication Date
1-1-2021
Keywords
  • Automatic evaluation; Dialogue generations; Dialogue systems; Human evaluation; Medical professionals; Overfitting; Prediction tasks; Pressung; Small data set
Disciplines
Comments

IR deposit conditions: none described

OA version available on ACL Anthology

Citation Information
M. Zhou et al., “On the generation of medical dialogs for COVID-19,” ACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference, vol. 2, pp. 886–896, 2021, doi: 10.18653/V1/2021.ACL-SHORT.112.