Knowledge Abstraction Matching for Medical Question Answering

Medical Question Answering (medical QA), which studies the problem of automatically answering patients' medical questions online, is one of the major applications of bioinformatics. Though many efforts have been made before, the medical QA system still deserves delicate algorithm optimization due to the serious application scenario and strict requirement for the answer quality. In this paper, we introduce a novel Knowledge Abstraction Matching (KAM) method for the medical QA problem. The intuition of KAM is that there are many frequent repeat text segments appearing in the answers across different questions. From this view, we propose a new method that consists of frequent segment N-gram mining, medical knowledge abstraction, medical segment matching and answer re-retrieval. KAM has been incorporated into Baidu's enterprise medical QA system MelodyQA deployed on the backend of Muzhi Doctor. The evaluation shows that the proposed method can generate more quality answers for MelodyQA with a significant improvement of question coverage under acceptable accuracy.