Domain Adaptation for Disease Phrase Matching with Adversarial Networks

Abstract

With the development of medical information management, numerous medical data are being classified, indexed, and searched in various systems. Disease phrase matching, i.e., deciding whether two given disease phrases interpret each other, is a basic but crucial preprocessing step for the above tasks. Being capable of relieving the scarceness of annotations, domain adaptation is generally considered useful in medical systems. However, efforts on applying it to phrase matching remain limited. This paper presents a domain-adaptive matching network for disease phrases. Our network achieves domain adaptation by adversarial training, i.e., preferring features indicating whether the two phrases match, rather than which domain they come from. Experiments suggest that our model has the best performance among the very few non-adaptive or adaptive methods that can benefit from out-of-domain annotations.

Tasks

Reproductions