scholarly journals Similarity of medical concepts in question and answering of health communities

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 1443-1454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamid Naderi ◽  
Sina Madani ◽  
Behzad Kiani ◽  
Kobra Etminani

The ability to automatically categorize submitted questions based on topics and suggest similar question and answer to the users reduces the number of redundant questions. Our objective was to compare intra-topic and inter-topic similarity between question and answers by using concept-based similarity computing analysis. We gathered existing question and answers from several popular online health communities. Then, Unified Medical Language System concepts related to selected questions and experts in different topics were extracted and weighted by term frequency -inverse document frequency values. Finally, the similarity between weighted vectors of Unified Medical Language System concepts was computed. Our result showed a considerable gap between intra-topic and inter-topic similarities in such a way that the average of intra-topic similarity (0.095, 0.192, and 0.110, respectively) was higher than the average of inter-topic similarity (0.012, 0.025, and 0.018, respectively) for questions of the top 3 popular online communities including NetWellness, WebMD, and Yahoo Answers. Similarity scores between the content of questions answered by experts in the same and different topics were calculated as 0.51 and 0.11, respectively. Concept-based similarity computing methods can be used in developing intelligent question and answering retrieval systems that contain auto recommendation functionality for similar questions and experts.

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (10) ◽  
pp. 1585-1592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yonatan Bitton ◽  
Raphael Cohen ◽  
Tamar Schifter ◽  
Eitan Bachmat ◽  
Michael Elhadad ◽  
...  

Abstract Objective In Hebrew online health communities, participants commonly write medical terms that appear as transliterated forms of a source term in English. Such transliterations introduce high variability in text and challenge text-analytics methods. To reduce their variability, medical terms must be normalized, such as linking them to Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts. We present a method to identify both transliterated and translated Hebrew medical terms and link them with UMLS entities. Materials and Methods We investigate the effect of linking terms in Camoni, a popular Israeli online health community in Hebrew. Our method, MDTEL (Medical Deep Transliteration Entity Linking), includes (1) an attention-based recurrent neural network encoder-decoder to transliterate words and mapping UMLS from English to Hebrew, (2) an unsupervised method for creating a transliteration dataset in any language without manually labeled data, and (3) an efficient way to identify and link medical entities in the Hebrew corpus to UMLS concepts, by producing a high-recall list of candidate medical terms in the corpus, and then filtering the candidates to relevant medical terms. Results We carry out experiments on 3 disease-specific communities: diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and depression. MDTEL tagging and normalizing on Camoni posts achieved 99% accuracy, 92% recall, and 87% precision. When tagging and normalizing terms in queries from the Camoni search logs, UMLS-normalized queries improved search results in 46% of the cases. Conclusions Cross-lingual UMLS entity linking from Hebrew is possible and improves search performance across communities. Annotated datasets, annotation guidelines, and code are made available online (https://github.com/yonatanbitton/mdtel).


1991 ◽  
Vol 11 (4_suppl) ◽  
pp. S89-S93 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Cimino ◽  
Soumitra Sengupta

The authors use an example to illustrate combining Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) components (applications) into an integral whole, to facilitate using the components simultaneously or in sequence. They examine a model for classifying IAIMS systems, proposing ways in which the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) can be exploited in them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (10) ◽  
pp. 1538-1546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuqing Mao ◽  
Kin Wah Fung

Abstract Objective The study sought to explore the use of deep learning techniques to measure the semantic relatedness between Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts. Materials and Methods Concept sentence embeddings were generated for UMLS concepts by applying the word embedding models BioWordVec and various flavors of BERT to concept sentences formed by concatenating UMLS terms. Graph embeddings were generated by the graph convolutional networks and 4 knowledge graph embedding models, using graphs built from UMLS hierarchical relations. Semantic relatedness was measured by the cosine between the concepts’ embedding vectors. Performance was compared with 2 traditional path-based (shortest path and Leacock-Chodorow) measurements and the publicly available concept embeddings, cui2vec, generated from large biomedical corpora. The concept sentence embeddings were also evaluated on a word sense disambiguation (WSD) task. Reference standards used included the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity datasets from the University of Minnesota, concept pairs generated from the Standardized MedDRA Queries and the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) WSD corpus. Results Sentence embeddings generated by BioWordVec outperformed all other methods used individually in semantic relatedness measurements. Graph convolutional network graph embedding uniformly outperformed path-based measurements and was better than some word embeddings for the Standardized MedDRA Queries dataset. When used together, combined word and graph embedding achieved the best performance in all datasets. For WSD, the enhanced versions of BERT outperformed BioWordVec. Conclusions Word and graph embedding techniques can be used to harness terms and relations in the UMLS to measure semantic relatedness between concepts. Concept sentence embedding outperforms path-based measurements and cui2vec, and can be further enhanced by combining with graph embedding.


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