Multi-source Seq2seq guided by knowledge for Chinese healthcare consultation

Online healthcare consultation offers people a convenient way to consult doctors. In this paper, we aim at building a generative dialog system for Chinese healthcare consultation. As the original Seq2seq architecture tends to suffer the issue of generating low-quality responses, the multi-source Seq2seq architecture generating more informative responses is much more preferred in this task. The multi-source Seq2seq architecture takes advantage of retrieval techniques to obtain responses from the database, and then takes these responses alongside the user-issued question as input. However, some of the retrieved responses might be not much related to the user-issued question, resulting in the generation of unsatisfying responses that are not correct in diagnosis or instead provide inappropriate advice on prevention or treatment. Therefore, this paper proposes multi-source Seq2seq guided by knowledge (MSSGK) to handle this problem. MSSGK differs from the multi-source Seq2seq architecture in that domain knowledge, including disease labels and topic labels about prevention and treatment, is introduced into the response generation via a multi-task learning framework. To better exploit the domain knowledge, we propose three attention mechanisms to provide more appropriate guidance for response generation. Experimental results on a dataset of real-world healthcare consultation show the effectiveness of the proposed method.