Volume 10, Number 14, November 2020

Chinese Medical Question Answer Matching based on Interactive Sentence Representation Learning

  Authors

Xiongtao Cui and Jungang Han, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications, China

  Abstract

Chinese medical question-answer matching is more challenging than the open-domain questionanswer matching in English. Even though the deep learning method has performed well in improving the performance of question-answer matching, these methods only focus on the semantic information inside sentences, while ignoring the semantic association between questions and answers, thus resulting in performance deficits. In this paper, we design a series of interactive sentence representation learning models to tackle this problem. To better adapt to Chinese medical question-answer matching and take the advantages of different neural network structures, we propose the Crossed BERT network to extract the deep semantic information inside the sentence and the semantic association between question and answer, and then combine with the multi-scale CNNs network or BiGRU network to take the advantage of different structure of neural networks to learn more semantic features into the sentence representation. The experiments on the cMedQA V2.0 and cMedQA V1.0 dataset show that our model significantly outperforms all the existing state-of-the-art models of Chinese medical question answer matching.

  Keywords

Question answer matching, Chinese medical field, interactive sentence representation, deep learning.