MAGE: Multi-scale Context-aware Interaction based on Multi-granularity Embedding for Chinese Medical Question Answer Matching. (January 2023)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Wang, Meiling; He, Xiaohai; Liu, Yan; Qing, Linbo; Zhang, Zhao; Chen, Honggang
• Is Part Of: Computer methods and programs in biomedicine. Volume 228(2023)
• Publication Date: 2023-01
• Subjects: Question answer matching -- Multi-granularity embedding -- Multi-scale context-aware interaction -- Attention mechanism; Medicine -- Computer programs -- Periodicals; Biology -- Computer programs -- Periodicals; Computers -- Periodicals; Medicine -- Periodicals; Médecine -- Logiciels -- Périodiques; Biologie -- Logiciels -- Périodiques; Biology -- Computer programs; Medicine -- Computer programs; Periodicals; Electronic journals; 610.28
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2022.107249
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0169-2607

Abstract

Highlights: A new Framework has been proposed for the Chinese medical question-answer matching. The ChineseBERT module was introduced for the question and answer multi-granularity embedding. The context-aware interaction module was structured for getting question-answer pair representation. The multi-view fusion layer was designed for fusing the question and answer features. The results reveal that the new framework contributes to Chinese medical question-answer matching tasks. Abstract: Background and Objective: The Chinese medical question answer matching (cMedQAM) task is the essential branch of the medical question answering system. Its goal is to accurately choose the correct response from a pool of candidate answers. The relatively effective methods are deep neural network-based and attention-based to obtain rich question-and-answer representations. However, those methods overlook the crucial characteristics of Chinese characters: glyphs and pinyin. Furthermore, they lose the local semantic information of the phrase by generating attention information using only relevant medical keywords. To address this challenge, we propose the multi-scale context-aware interaction approach based on multi-granularity embedding (MAGE) in this paper. Methods: We adapted ChineseBERT, which integrates Chinese characters glyphs and pinyin information into the language model and fine-tunes the medical corpus. It solves the common phenomenon of homonyms in Chinese. Moreover, we proposed a context-aware interactive module to correctly align question and answer sequences and infer semantic relationships. Finally, we utilized the multi-view fusion method to combine local semantic features and attention representation. Results: We conducted validation experiments on the three publicly available datasets, namely cMedQA V1.0, cMedQA V2.0, and cEpilepsyQA. The proposed multi-scale context-aware interaction approach based on the multi-granularity embedding method is validated by top-1 accuracy. On cMedQA V1.0, cMedQA V2.0, and cEpilepsyQA, the top-1 accuracy on the test dataset was improved by 74.1%, 82.7%, and 60.9%, respectively. Experimental results on the three datasets demonstrate that our MAGE achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods for the Chinese medical question answer matching tasks. Conclusions: The experiment results indicate that the proposed model can improve the accuracy of the Chinese medical question answer matching task. Therefore, it may be considered a potential intelligent assistant tool for the future Chinese medical answer question system.