Xingyi Yang


2021

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Writing by Memorizing: Hierarchical Retrieval-based Medical Report Generation
Xingyi Yang | Muchao Ye | Quanzeng You | Fenglong Ma
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Medical report generation is one of the most challenging tasks in medical image analysis. Although existing approaches have achieved promising results, they either require a predefined template database in order to retrieve sentences or ignore the hierarchical nature of medical report generation. To address these issues, we propose MedWriter that incorporates a novel hierarchical retrieval mechanism to automatically extract both report and sentence-level templates for clinically accurate report generation. MedWriter first employs the Visual-Language Retrieval (VLR) module to retrieve the most relevant reports for the given images. To guarantee the logical coherence between generated sentences, the Language-Language Retrieval (LLR) module is introduced to retrieve relevant sentences based on the previous generated description. At last, a language decoder fuses image features and features from retrieved reports and sentences to generate meaningful medical reports. We verified the effectiveness of our model by automatic evaluation and human evaluation on two datasets, i.e., Open-I and MIMIC-CXR.

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On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19
Meng Zhou | Zechen Li | Bowen Tan | Guangtao Zeng | Wenmian Yang | Xuehai He | Zeqian Ju | Subrato Chakravorty | Shu Chen | Xingyi Yang | Yichen Zhang | Qingyang Wu | Zhou Yu | Kun Xu | Eric Xing | Pengtao Xie
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVID19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. Because of the shortage of medical professionals, many people cannot receive online consultations timely. To address this problem, we aim to develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations. We collected two dialog datasets – CovidDialog – (in English and Chinese respectively) containing conversations between doctors and patients about COVID-19. While the largest of their kind, these two datasets are still relatively small compared with general-domain dialog datasets. Training complex dialog generation models on small datasets bears high risk of overfitting. To alleviate overfitting, we develop a multi-task learning approach, which regularizes the data-deficient dialog generation task with a masked token prediction task. Experiments on the CovidDialog datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We perform both human evaluation and automatic evaluation of dialogs generated by our method. Results show that the generated responses are promising in being doctor-like, relevant to conversation history, clinically informative and correct. The code and the data are available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/COVID-Dialogue.