Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Ellipsis and Coreference Resolution in a Computerized Virtual Patient Dialogue System

  • Systems-Level Quality Improvement
  • Published:
Journal of Medical Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper describes the design of an ellipsis and coreference resolution module integrated in a computerized virtual patient dialogue system. Real medical diagnosis dialogues have been collected and analyzed. Several groups of diagnosis-related concepts were defined and used to construct rules, patterns, and features to detect and resolve ellipsis and coreference. The best F-scores of ellipsis detection and resolution were 89.15 % and 83.40 %, respectively. The best F-scores of phrasal coreference detection and resolution were 93.83 % and 83.40 %, respectively. The accuracy of pronominal anaphora resolution was 92 % for the 3rd-person singular pronouns referring to specific entities, and 97.31 % for other pronouns.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/

  2. http://lope.linguistics.ntu.edu.tw/cwn2/

  3. http://ir.hit.edu.cn/demo/ltp/Sharing_Plan.htm

  4. https://taku910.github.io/crfpp/

Reference

  1. Ogiela, L., Computational Intelligence in Cognitive Healthcare Information Systems. Stud. Comp. Intell. 309:347–369, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Ogiela, M.R., and Bodzioch, S., Computer Analysis of Gallbladder Ultrasonic Images Towards Recognition of Pathological Lesions. Opto-Electron. Rev. 19(2):155–168, 2011.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Wang, C. H., Yang, G. G., Liu, R. L., Lin, W. C., and Lin, C. J., Developing computerized virtual patients in PBL for medical students at Tzu-Chi University. Proceedings of the 1st Asia-Pacific Joint PBL Conference 2010, 93, 2010.

  4. Stoyanov, V., Gilbert, N., Cardie, C., and Riloff, E., Conundrums in noun phrase coreference resolution: making sense of the state-of-the-art. Proc. ACL-IJCNLP 2009, 656–664, 2009.

  5. Singh, S., Subramanya, A., Perira, F., and Mccallum, A., Large-scale cross-document coreference using distributed inference and hierarchical models. Proc. Assoc. Comp. Linguist. 2011:793–803, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Recasens, M., and Hovy, E., Coreference resolution across corpora: languages, coding schemes, and preprocessing information. Proc. Assoc. Comp. Linguist. 2010:1423–1432, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Ng, V., Semantic class induction and coreference resolution. Proc. Assoc. Comp. Linguist. 2007:536–543, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Kobdani, H., Schiitze, H., Schielen, M., and Kamp, H., Bootstrapping coreference resolution using word association. Proceedings of ACL. 2011:783–792, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Rahman, A., and Ng, V., Coreference resolution with world knowledge. Proc. ACL. 2011:814–824, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Ding, X., and Liu, B., Resolving object and attribute coreference in opinion mining. Proc. COLING. 2010:268–276, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Zhang, Y., Guo, J., Yu, Z., Zhang, Z., and Yao, X., The research on Chinese coreference resolution based on maximum entropy model and rules. Proceedings of WISM 2009. LNCS. 5854:1–8, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Ren, F., and Zhu, J., An effective hybrid machine learning approach for coreference resolution. Proceedings of SIGHAN-6, 24–30, 2009.

  13. Vemulapalli, S., Luo, X., Pitrelli, J. F., and Zitouni, I., Classifier combination techniques applied to coreference resolution. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, Student Workshop, 1-6, 2009.

  14. Wang, C. S., and Ngai, G., A clustering approach for unsupervised Chinese coreference resolution. Proceedings of SIGHAN-5, 40–47, 2006.

  15. Li, S., Li, W., and Zhou, C., Research on Chinese ellipsis recovering based on discourse representation theory. Proceedings of ICTAI ‘05, 667–670, 2005.

  16. Fukumoto, J., Answering questions of Information Access Dialogue (IAD) task using ellipsis handling of follow-up questions. Proceedings of the Interactive Question Answering Workshop at HLT-NAACL 2006, 41–48, 2006.

  17. Peng, J., Araki, K., Zero-anaphora resolution in Chinese using maximum entropy. IEICE, E90-D:7, 1092–1102, 2007.

  18. Williams, S., Anaphoric reference and ellipsis resolution in a telephone-based spoken language system for accessing Email. In Botley. S. P., and McEnery. T., (eds.) Corpus-based and computational approaches to discourse anaphora. Chap. 9:171–187, 2000. doi:10.1075/scl.3.09wil.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Huang, Y., Zheng, F., Su, Y., Li, F., and Wu, W., A theme structure method for the ellipsis resolution. Proceedings of EuroSpeech. 2001:2153–2156, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Su, Y., Zheng, F., and Huang, Y., Design of a semantic parser with support to ellipsis resolution in a Chinese spoken language dialogue system. Proceedings of EuroSpeech. 2001:2161–2164, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Xu, Y., Liu, J., and Seneff, S., Mandarin language understanding in dialogue context. Proceedings of International Conference on Speech and Language Processing, 113-116, 2008.

  22. Chitturi, R., Novel approach of domain specific ellipsis handling in question answering systems. Proceedings of SPECOM 2005, 2005.

  23. Shi, S. M., Huang, H. Y., and Chen, R. Y., A method of Chinese coreference resolution combined multi-features in discourse. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 1311-1316, 2010.

  24. Huang, C. R., Hsieh, S. K., Hong, J. F., Chen, Y. Z., Su, I L., Chen, Y. X., and Huang, S. W., Chinese WordNet: design, implementation, and application of an infrastructure for cross-lingual knowledge processing, 中國語文, 24:2, 2010. (in Chinese)

  25. Chen, K. J., Huang, C. R., Chang, L. P., and Hsu, H. L., Sinica Corpus: design methodology for balanced corpora. Proceeding of the 11th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, 167–176, 1996.

  26. Lafferty, J., McCallum, A., Pereira, F., Conditional random fields: Probabilistic models for segmenting and labeling sequence data. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Machine Learning, 282–289, 2001.

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology (previous National Science Council, grant NSC 100-2221-E-019-062.) Special thanks go to Dr. Gee-Gwo Yang and Dr. Chien-Hsing Wang in the Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital for their helps in recording diagnosis dialogues and verifying the dataset.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan

    Chuan-Jie Lin, Chien-Wei Pao, Yen-Heng Chen & Chi-Ting Liu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hui-Huang Hsu

Authors
  1. Chuan-Jie Lin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Chien-Wei Pao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Yen-Heng Chen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Chi-Ting Liu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Hui-Huang Hsu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Chuan-Jie Lin or Hui-Huang Hsu.

Additional information

This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lin, CJ., Pao, CW., Chen, YH. et al. Ellipsis and Coreference Resolution in a Computerized Virtual Patient Dialogue System. J Med Syst 40, 206 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-016-0562-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-016-0562-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation