MedDialog: Large-scale Medical Dialogue Datasets

Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Zeqian Ju, Yue Yang, Sicheng Wang, Ruisi Zhang, Meng Zhou, Jiaqi Zeng, Xiangyu Dong, Ruoyu Zhang, Hongchao Fang, Penghui Zhu, Shu Chen, Pengtao Xie


Abstract
Medical dialogue systems are promising in assisting in telemedicine to increase access to healthcare services, improve the quality of patient care, and reduce medical costs. To facilitate the research and development of medical dialogue systems, we build large-scale medical dialogue datasets – MedDialog, which contain 1) a Chinese dataset with 3.4 million conversations between patients and doctors, 11.3 million utterances, 660.2 million tokens, covering 172 specialties of diseases, and 2) an English dataset with 0.26 million conversations, 0.51 million utterances, 44.53 million tokens, covering 96 specialties of diseases. To our best knowledge, MedDialog is the largest medical dialogue dataset to date. We pretrain several dialogue generation models on the Chinese MedDialog dataset, including Transformer, GPT, BERT-GPT, and compare their performance. It is shown that models trained on MedDialog are able to generate clinically correct and doctor-like medical dialogues. We also study the transferability of models trained on MedDialog to low-resource medical dialogue generation tasks. It is shown that via transfer learning which finetunes the models pretrained on MedDialog, the performance on medical dialogue generation tasks with small datasets can be greatly improved, as shown in human evaluation and automatic evaluation. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/Medical-Dialogue-System
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.743
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9241–9250
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.743
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.743
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Zeqian Ju, Yue Yang, Sicheng Wang, Ruisi Zhang, Meng Zhou, Jiaqi Zeng, Xiangyu Dong, Ruoyu Zhang, Hongchao Fang, Penghui Zhu, Shu Chen, and Pengtao Xie. 2020. MedDialog: Large-scale Medical Dialogue Datasets. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 9241–9250, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MedDialog: Large-scale Medical Dialogue Datasets (Zeng et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2020.emnlp-main.743.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938668
Code
 UCSD-AI4H/Medical-Dialogue-System