Knowledge-Aware Neural Networks for Medical Forum Question Classification

Soumyadeep Roy, Sudip Chakraborty, Aishik Mandal, Gunjan Balde, Prakhar Sharma, Anandhavelu Natarajan, Megha Khosla, Shamik Sural, Niloy Ganguly

Online medical forums have become a predominant platform for answering health-related information needs of consumers. However, with a significant rise in the number of queries and the limited availability of experts, it is necessary to automatically classify medical queries based on a consumer's intention, so that these questions may be directed to the right set of medical experts. Here, we develop a novel medical knowledge-aware BERT-based model (MedBERT) that explicitly gives more weightage to medical concept-bearing words, and utilize domain-specific side information obtained from a popular medical knowledge base. We also contribute a multi-label dataset for the Medical Forum Question Classification (MFQC) task. MedBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets and performs very well in low resource settings.

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Knowledge Graph

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