Exploring Semantic Information in Disease: Data Augmentation Techniques for Chinese Disease Name Normalization

Core Concepts

Novel data augmentation techniques enhance disease name normalization performance by respecting structural invariance and hierarchy properties.

Abstract

The content delves into disease name normalization challenges, introduces data augmentation methods, and evaluates their effectiveness across various models. It highlights the importance of semantic integrity and hierarchical structure in enhancing model performance.

Challenges: Varied writing styles, semantic density, data scarcity.
Methods: Axis-Word Replacement (AR), Multi-Granularity Aggregation (MGA).
Results: Improved performance across baseline models, especially on smaller datasets.
Comparison: Outperforms EDA and Back Translation methods.
Ablation Study: Removal of methods leads to decreased performance.
Smaller Datasets: Performance improvement more pronounced with smaller datasets.
LLM Baselines Comparison: Demonstrates superior tradeoff between model size and performance compared to LLMs.

Stats

Our method can achieve on-par performance with ChatGPT while being over 3,000 times smaller in size.

Quotes

"Our proposed method can significantly outperform a model over 50 times larger in size."

Key Insights Distilled From

Exploring semantic information in disease

by Wenqian Cui,... at arxiv.org 03-21-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.01931.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can the authenticity of generated disease names be ensured?

Ensuring the authenticity of generated disease names is crucial to prevent bias and misinformation in models. One way to enhance authenticity is by implementing rigorous semantic filtering techniques post data augmentation. This involves evaluating the similarity between the unnormalized and standard disease names at both character level (using normalized n-gram matching) and contextual semantic level (utilizing cosine similarity with BERT embeddings). By setting thresholds for these metrics, only pairs that meet a certain level of similarity are retained, filtering out potentially inaccurate or fictitious disease names.

Can these methods be effectively applied to English disease names?

While the proposed data augmentation methods have shown effectiveness in Chinese disease name normalization tasks, applying them to English disease names may present challenges due to differences in language structure and semantics. For instance, English diseases may contain single words representing multiple axes, making it complex to adapt the concept directly. Further research would be needed to modify these methods for English datasets, considering nuances like word meanings and syntactic structures unique to English medical terminology.

What are the implications of these findings for medical language processing tasks beyond disease name normalization?

The findings from this study have broader implications for medical language processing tasks beyond just disease name normalization. The novel data augmentation techniques developed could be adapted and applied to various other healthcare-related NLP tasks such as symptom detection, diagnosis prediction, entity linking, and clinical text classification. By leveraging structural invariance and hierarchy properties within medical terms similar to those explored in this study, models can gain a deeper understanding of complex healthcare concepts leading to improved performance across a range of medical NLP applications.