The Clinical Terminology Normalization aims at finding standard terms from a given termbase for mentions extracted from clinical texts. However, we found that extracted mentions suffer from the multi-implication problem, especially disease diagnoses. The reason for this is that physicians often use abbreviations, conjunctions, and juxtapositions when writing diagnoses, and it is difficult to manually decompose. To address this problem, we propose a Terminology Component Recognition and Reconstruction strategy that leverages the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) to recognize the components of terms, enabling automated decomposition and transforming original mentions into multiple atomic mentions. Furthermore, we adopt the mainstream “Recall and Rank” framework to apply the benefits of the above strategy to the task flow. By leveraging the LLM incorporating the advanced sampling strategies, we design a sampling algorithm for atomic mentions and train the recall model using contrastive learning. Besides the information about the components is also used as knowledge to guide the final term ranking and selection. The experimental results show that our proposed strategy effectively improves the performance of the terminology normalization task and our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on the experimental dataset. We release our code and data on the repository https://github.com/yuugaochyan/RRNorm.

Most medical dialogue systems assume that patients have clear goals (seeking a diagnosis, medicine querying, etc.) before medical consultation. However, in many real situations, due to the lack of medical knowledge, it is usually difficult for patients to determine clear goals with all necessary slots. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct medical consultation dialogue systems to help patients clarify their goals. For further study, we create a novel human-to-human mixed-type medical consultation dialogue corpus, termed MidMed, covering four dialogue types: task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, recommendation, QA, and chitchat. MidMed covers four departments (otorhinolaryngology, ophthalmology, skin, and digestive system), with 8,309 dialogues. Furthermore, we build benchmarking baselines on MidMed and propose an instruction-guiding medical dialogue generation framework, termed InsMed, to handle mixed-type dialogues. Experimental results show the effectiveness of InsMed.