Chinese medical question answer selection via hybrid models based on CNN and GRU

Abstract

Question answer selection in the Chinese medical field is very challenging since it requires effective text representations to capture the complex semantic relationships between Chinese questions and answers. Recent approaches on deep learning, e.g., CNN and RNN, have shown their potential in improving the selection quality. However, these existing methods can only capture a part or one-side of semantic relationships while ignoring the other rich and sophisticated ones, leading to limited performance improvement. In this paper, a series of neural network models are proposed to address Chinese medical question answer selection issue. In order to model the complex relationships between questions and answers, we develop both single and hybrid models with CNN and GRU to combine the merits of different neural network architectures. This is different from existing works that can onpy capture partial relationships by utilizing a single network structure. Extensive experimental results on cMedQA dataset demonstrate that the proposed hybrid models, especially BiGRU-CNN, significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods. The source codes of our models are available in the GitHub (https://github.com/zhangyuteng/MedicalQA-CNN-BiGRU).