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DIPE: a diagnosis-assisted inquiry point extractor towards medical dialogues

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Abstract

Automatic knowledge extraction from medical dialogues has emerged as an increasingly significant problem in modern medical care. However, diagnosis characteristics of medical texts and imbalanced distribution of item categories within inquiry points are ignored in traditional methods used for medical information extraction, resulting in unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a Diagnosis-assisted Inquiry Point Extractor (DIPE), where a novel hierarchical attention mechanism, named WSWC (Word-Sentence-Window-Context), is devised to simulate diagnosis-oriented inference and further effectively captures semantic correlation in utterances. Additionally, we construct an imbalance-aware loss function to mitigate the imbalanced distribution of entity categories within inquiry points by assigning weights based on the disparity in sample counts for each category. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that DIPE is an effective solution for inquiry point extraction in medical dialogues.

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Data availability and access

All the experiments are conducted utilizing publicly accessible datasets.

Notes

  1. https://www.chunyuyisheng.com

  2. https://jiankang.baidu.com

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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Qi Li, Faliang Huang, Lin Ge, and Jie Zhao. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Qi Li and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Faliang Huang.

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Li, Q., Huang, F., Ge, L. et al. DIPE: a diagnosis-assisted inquiry point extractor towards medical dialogues. Appl Intell 55, 230 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-024-06138-x

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