Understanding Medical Conversations with Scattered Keyword Attention and Weak Supervision from Responses

Abstract In this work, we consider the medical slot filling problem, i.e., the problem of converting medical queries into structured representations which is a challenging task. We analyze the effectiveness of two points: scattered keywords in user utterances and weak supervision with responses. We approach the medical slot filling as a multi-label classification problem with label-embedding attentive model to pay more attention to scattered medical keywords and learn the classification models by weak-supervision from responses. To evaluate the approaches, we annotate a medical slot filling data and collect a large scale unlabeled data. The experiments demonstrate that these two points are promising to improve the task.