Data Augmentation Techniques for Chinese Disease Name Normalization
This work addresses a data scarcity issue in medical NLP for Chinese disease name normalization, which is incremental as it builds on existing models with new augmentation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of severe training data shortage in Chinese disease name normalization by proposing a novel data augmentation approach, which shows significant performance improvements across various baseline models, especially in limited-data scenarios.
Disease name normalization is an important task in the medical domain. It classifies disease names written in various formats into standardized names, serving as a fundamental component in smart healthcare systems for various disease-related functions. Nevertheless, the most significant obstacle to existing disease name normalization systems is the severe shortage of training data. Consequently, we present a novel data augmentation approach that includes a series of data augmentation techniques and some supporting modules to help mitigate the problem. Through extensive experimentation, we illustrate that our proposed approach exhibits significant performance improvements across various baseline models and training objectives, particularly in scenarios with limited training data