Acupuncture and Tuina Knowledge Graph for Ancient Literature of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Author(s):  
Xiaosong Han ◽  
Xiaoran Li ◽  
Yanchun Liang ◽  
Xinghao Wang ◽  
Dong Xu ◽  
...  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongmei Lu ◽  
Li Chen ◽  
Tingting Zhang ◽  
Lingmei Bu ◽  
Ying Ye ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Ancient literature of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) contains massive clinical experiences which are important ingredient of TCM knowledge and valuable for TCM clinical practice of nowadays. However, it is difficult for TCM professionals to acquire such valuable experiences due to their massive volume and broad occurrence in the literature. Furthermore, different characteristics of ancient Chinese language from the modern one lead to additional challenges for analyzing the literature, regardless of how to perform the analyzing, manually or automatically with a software toolkit. Methods: In order to overcome the aforementioned challenges, we formalize a novel information extraction task for ancient literature of TCM, and the entities to be extracted are Disease-Specific Clinical Experiences (DSCEs) occurring in the literature. For the purpose, we have collected two corpora from ancient literature of TCM and annotated them manually with DSCEs occurrence information for the diseases pregnant abdominalgia and colporrhagia (妊娠腹痛及下血) and jaundice (黄疸) respectively. We further propose a deep learning and CRF-based algorithmic framework with character encoding of ancient Chinese, thus avoiding the special difficulty in word segmentation for ancient Chinese texts. We investigate the framework with different methods for contextual encoding of characters in a sentence, including CNN, Bi-LSTM and BERT, and diverse approaches to aggregate contextual information of characters into a sentence encoding, such as max-pooling and attention mechanism. After that all the encoded sentences in a section of the literature are passed through a Bi-LSTM-based sequence labelling model with CRF inference on its top to obtain an optimal label sequence for the sentences in the section. Results: We conduct a series of experiments on the two corpora to verify the effectiveness of our framework for the task, and evaluate its effectiveness with different metrics in two granularities of labelling, namely accuracy/F1-value in sentence-level labelling and precision/recall/F1-value in correct recognition of the whole DSCEs. Conclusion: The experimental results demonstrate that the deep learning and CRF-based framework with character encoding of ancient Chinese could achieve an accuracy of 80.40%±1.64% and an F1-value of 76.73%±1.59% for the sentence labelling, while for recognition of the whole DSCEs, it is able to obtain the recall of 44.97%±2.16% and the precision of 51.13%±2.64%, meaning that the framework is a promising baseline for further development of the novel information extraction task for TCM.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 4197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Chi ◽  
Congcong Yu ◽  
Xiaohui Qi ◽  
Hao Xu

In the past 40 years, with the changes to dietary structure and the dramatic increase in the consumption of meat products in developing countries, especially in China, encouraging populations to maintain their previous healthy eating patterns will have health, environmental, and economic co-benefits. Healthy diet education plays an important role in the promotion of people’s healthy behavior. However, in the modern age, the data regarding healthy diets available on the internet is increasing rapidly and is distributed on multiple sources. It is time-consuming for users to learn about healthy diets on the internet: they need to search data on multiple platforms, choose and integrate information, and then understand what they have learned. To help people retrieve and learn healthy diet knowledge more efficiently and comprehensively, this paper designs a knowledge graph to integrate healthy diet information on the internet and provides a semantic retrieval system. In the knowledge graph, five main concepts are defined, including food material, dish, nutritional element, symptom, and crowd, as well as the relationships among them. In addition, Chinese dietary culture elements and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) theory are also contained in the knowledge graph. The preliminary results show that by using the system, users learn healthy diet knowledge more quickly and comprehensively and they are more inclined to have balanced diets. This work could be regarded as a retrieval and education tool, which can assist healthcare and national sustainable development.


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