@inproceedings{lu-etal-2022-doctor,
    title = "Doctor Recommendation in Online Health Forums via Expertise Learning",
    author = "Lu, Xiaoxin  and
      Zhang, Yubo  and
      Li, Jing  and
      Zong, Shi",
    editor = "Muresan, Smaranda  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Villavicencio, Aline",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2022.acl-long.79/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.79",
    pages = "1111--1123",
    abstract = "Huge volumes of patient queries are daily generated on online health forums, rendering manual doctor allocation a labor-intensive task. To better help patients, this paper studies a novel task of doctor recommendation to enable automatic pairing of a patient to a doctor with relevant expertise. While most prior work in recommendation focuses on modeling target users from their past behavior, we can only rely on the limited words in a query to infer a patient{'}s needs for privacy reasons. For doctor modeling, we study the joint effects of their profiles and previous dialogues with other patients and explore their interactions via self-learning. The learned doctor embeddings are further employed to estimate their capabilities of handling a patient query with a multi-head attention mechanism. For experiments, a large-scale dataset is collected from Chunyu Yisheng, a Chinese online health forum, where our model exhibits the state-of-the-art results, outperforming baselines only consider profiles and past dialogues to characterize a doctor."
}