TCM-SD: A Benchmark for Probing Syndrome Differentiation via Natural Language Processing

Ren Mucheng, Huang Heyan, Zhou Yuxiang, Cao Qianwen, Bu Yuan, Gao Yang


Abstract
“Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a natural, safe, and effective therapy that has spread and been applied worldwide. The unique TCM diagnosis and treatment system requires a comprehensive analysis of a patient’s symptoms hidden in the clinical record written in free text. Prior studies have shown that this system can be informationized and intelligentized with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as natural language processing (NLP). However, existing datasets are not of sufficient quality nor quantity to support the further development of data-driven AI technology in TCM. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the core task of the TCM diagnosis and treatment system—syndrome differentiation (SD)—and we introduce the first public large-scale benchmark for SD, called TCM-SD. Our benchmark contains 54,152 real-world clinical records covering 148 syndromes. Furthermore, we collect a large-scale unlabelled textual corpus in the field of TCM and propose a domain-specific pre-trained language model, called ZYBERT. We conducted experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance baseline, reveal various challenges in SD, and prove the potential of domain-specific pre-trained language model. Our study and analysis reveal opportunities for incorporating computer science and linguistics knowledge to explore the empirical validity of TCM theories.”
Anthology ID:
2022.ccl-1.80
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Nanchang, China
Venue:
CCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Chinese Information Processing Society of China
Note:
Pages:
908–920
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.ccl-1.80
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ren Mucheng, Huang Heyan, Zhou Yuxiang, Cao Qianwen, Bu Yuan, and Gao Yang. 2022. TCM-SD: A Benchmark for Probing Syndrome Differentiation via Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the 21st Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 908–920, Nanchang, China. Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
Cite (Informal):
TCM-SD: A Benchmark for Probing Syndrome Differentiation via Natural Language Processing (Mucheng et al., CCL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.ccl-1.80.pdf
Code
 borororo/zy-bert