KI-MAG: A knowledge-infused abstractive question answering system in medical domain

Abstract

Abstractive question-answering (QA) has emerged as a prominent area in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to its ability to produce concise and human-like responses, particularly with the advancement of Large Language Models. Despite its potential, abstractive QA suffers from challenges like the need for extensive training data and the generation of incorrect entities and out-of-context words in the responses. In safety–critical domains like medical and clinical settings, such issues are unacceptable and may compromise the accuracy and reliability of generated answers. We proposed KI-MAG (Knowledge-Infused Medical Abstractive Generator) model, a novel Knowledge-Infused Abstractive Question Answering System specifically designed for the medical domain. KI-MAG aims to address the aforementioned limitations and enhance the correctness of generated responses while mitigating data sparsity concerns. The KI-MAG system produces more precise and informative answers by incorporating relevant medical entities into the model’s generation process. Furthermore, we adopt a synthetic data generation approach using question–answer pairs to overcome the challenge of limited training data in the medical domain. These synthetic pairs augment the original dataset, resulting in better model generalization and improved performance. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the KI-MAG system. Compared to traditional abstractive QA models, our approach exhibits a substantial increase of approximately 15% in Blue-1, Blue-2, Blue-3, and Blue-4 scores, indicating a remarkable improvement in answer accuracy and overall quality of responses. Overall, our Knowledge-Infused Abstractive Question Answering System in the Medical Domain (KI-MAG) presents a promising solution to enhance the performance and reliability of abstractive QA models in safety–critical medical applications where precision and correctness of answers are of utmost importance.