Natural language understanding for task oriented dialog in the biomedical domain in a low resources context
This work addresses the lack of sharable datasets for biomedical NLP applications, offering a baseline method for researchers and practitioners in this domain, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackled the problem of developing natural language understanding models for task-oriented dialog in the biomedical domain under low-resource conditions by using data generation and augmentation techniques, achieving an F-score of 0.76 for slot-filling and 0.71 for intent classification.
In the biomedical domain, the lack of sharable datasets often limit the possibility of developing natural language processing systems, especially dialogue applications and natural language understanding models. To overcome this issue, we explore data generation using templates and terminologies and data augmentation approaches. Namely, we report our experiments using paraphrasing and word representations learned on a large EHR corpus with Fasttext and ELMo, to learn a NLU model without any available dataset. We evaluate on a NLU task of natural language queries in EHRs divided in slot-filling and intent classification sub-tasks. On the slot-filling task, we obtain a F-score of 0.76 with the ELMo representation; and on the classification task, a mean F-score of 0.71. Our results show that this method could be used to develop a baseline system.