Peiming Ge

J Liu, R Bai, Z Lu et al.

In medical fields, text classification is one of the most important tasks that can significantly reduce human workload through structured information digitization and intelligent decision support. Despite the popularity of learning-based text classification techniques, it is hard for human to understand or manually fine-tune the classification results for better precision and recall, due to the black box nature of learning. This study proposes a novel regular expression-based text classification method making use of genetic programming (GP) approaches to evolve regular expressions that can classify a given medical text inquiry with satisfactory precision and recall while allow human to read the classifier and fine-tune accordingly if necessary. Given a seed population of regular expressions (can be randomly initialized or manually constructed by experts), our method evolves a population of regular expressions according to chosen fitness function, using a novel regular expression syntax and a series of carefully chosen reproduction operators. Our method is evaluated with real-life medical text inquiries from an online healthcare provider and shows promising performance. More importantly, our method generates classifiers that can be fully understood, checked and updated by medical doctors, which are fundamentally crucial for medical related practices.

Chaofan Tu, Ruibin Bai, Zheng Lu et al.

In this paper, we propose a rule-based engine composed of high quality and interpretable regular expressions for medical text classification. The regular expressions are auto generated by a constructive heuristic method and optimized using a Pool-based Simulated Annealing (PSA) approach. Although existing Deep Neural Network (DNN) methods present high quality performance in most Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, the solutions are regarded as uninterpretable black boxes to humans. Therefore, rule-based methods are often introduced when interpretable solutions are needed, especially in the medical field. However, the construction of regular expressions can be extremely labor-intensive for large data sets. This research aims to reduce the manual efforts while maintaining high-quality solutions

Xiang Li, Xinyu Fu, Zheng Lu et al.

Internet hospital is a rising business thanks to recent advances in mobile web technology and high demand of health care services. Online medical services become increasingly popular and active. According to US data in 2018, 80 percent of internet users have asked health-related questions online. Numerous data is generated in unprecedented speed and scale. Those representative questions and answers in medical fields are valuable raw data sources for medical data mining. Automated machine interpretation on those sheer amount of data gives an opportunity to assist doctors to answer frequently asked medical-related questions from the perspective of information retrieval and machine learning approaches. In this work, we propose a novel two-stage framework for the semantic matching of query-level medical questions.