DKEC: Domain Knowledge Enhanced Multi-Label Classification for Diagnosis Prediction

Xueren Ge, Abhishek Satpathy, Ronald Dean Williams, John Stankovic, Homa Alemzadeh


Abstract
Multi-label text classification (MLTC) tasks in the medical domain often face the long-tail label distribution problem. Prior works have explored hierarchical label structures to find relevant information for few-shot classes, but mostly neglected to incorporate external knowledge from medical guidelines. This paper presents DKEC, Domain Knowledge Enhanced Classification for diagnosis prediction with two innovations: (1) automated construction of heterogeneous knowledge graphs from external sources to capture semantic relations among diverse medical entities, (2) incorporating the heterogeneous knowledge graphs in few-shot classification using a label-wise attention mechanism. We construct DKEC using three online medical knowledge sources and evaluate it on a real-world Emergency Medical Services (EMS) dataset and a public electronic health record (EHR) dataset. Results show that DKEC outperforms the state-of-the-art label-wise attention networks and transformer models of different sizes, particularly for the few-shot classes. More importantly, it helps the smaller language models achieve comparable performance to large language models.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.712
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12798–12813
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2024.emnlp-main.712/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.712
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xueren Ge, Abhishek Satpathy, Ronald Dean Williams, John Stankovic, and Homa Alemzadeh. 2024. DKEC: Domain Knowledge Enhanced Multi-Label Classification for Diagnosis Prediction. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12798–12813, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DKEC: Domain Knowledge Enhanced Multi-Label Classification for Diagnosis Prediction (Ge et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2024.emnlp-main.712.pdf