English

Medical Knowledge-enriched Textual Entailment Framework

Computation and Language 2020-11-11 v1

Abstract

One of the cardinal tasks in achieving robust medical question answering systems is textual entailment. The existing approaches make use of an ensemble of pre-trained language models or data augmentation, often to clock higher numbers on the validation metrics. However, two major shortcomings impede higher success in identifying entailment: (1) understanding the focus/intent of the question and (2) ability to utilize the real-world background knowledge to capture the context beyond the sentence. In this paper, we present a novel Medical Knowledge-Enriched Textual Entailment framework that allows the model to acquire a semantic and global representation of the input medical text with the help of a relevant domain-specific knowledge graph. We evaluate our framework on the benchmark MEDIQA-RQE dataset and manifest that the use of knowledge enriched dual-encoding mechanism help in achieving an absolute improvement of 8.27% over SOTA language models. We have made the source code available here.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.05257,
  title  = {Medical Knowledge-enriched Textual Entailment Framework},
  author = {Shweta Yadav and Vishal Pallagani and Amit Sheth},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.05257},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:03:16.326Z