Enhancing Medical Dialogue Generation through Knowledge Refinement and Dynamic Prompt Adjustment

Hongda Sun, Jiaren Peng, Wenzhong Yang, Liang He, Bo Du, Rui Yan


Abstract
Medical dialogue systems (MDS) have emerged as crucial online platforms for enabling multi-turn, context-aware conversations with patients. However, existing MDS often struggle to (1) identify relevant medical knowledge and (2) generate personalized, medically accurate responses. To address these challenges, we propose MedRef, a novel MDS that incorporates knowledge refining and dynamic prompt adjustment. First, we employ a knowledge refining mechanism to filter out irrelevant medical data, improving predictions of critical medical entities in responses. Additionally, we design a comprehensive prompt structure that incorporates historical details and evident details. To enable real-time adaptability to diverse patient conditions, we implement two key modules, Triplet Filter and Demo Selector, providing appropriate knowledge and demonstrations equipped in the system prompt.Extensive experiments on MedDG and KaMed benchmarks show that MedRef outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both generation quality and medical entity accuracy, underscoring its effectiveness and reliability for real-world healthcare applications.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1320
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venues:
Findings | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25715–25726
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.1320/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hongda Sun, Jiaren Peng, Wenzhong Yang, Liang He, Bo Du, and Rui Yan. 2025. Enhancing Medical Dialogue Generation through Knowledge Refinement and Dynamic Prompt Adjustment. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 25715–25726, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Medical Dialogue Generation through Knowledge Refinement and Dynamic Prompt Adjustment (Sun et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.1320.pdf