@inproceedings{shi-etal-2023-midmed,
    title = "{M}id{M}ed: Towards Mixed-Type Dialogues for Medical Consultation",
    author = "Shi, Xiaoming  and
      Liu, Zeming  and
      Wang, Chuan  and
      Leng, Haitao  and
      Xue, Kui  and
      Zhang, Xiaofan  and
      Zhang, Shaoting",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.453",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.453",
    pages = "8145--8157",
    abstract = "Most medical dialogue systems assume that patients have clear goals (seeking a diagnosis, medicine querying, etc.) before medical consultation. However, in many real situations, due to the lack of medical knowledge, it is usually difficult for patients to determine clear goals with all necessary slots. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct medical consultation dialogue systems to help patients clarify their goals. For further study, we create a novel human-to-human mixed-type medical consultation dialogue corpus, termed MidMed, covering four dialogue types: task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, recommendation, QA, and chitchat. MidMed covers four departments (otorhinolaryngology, ophthalmology, skin, and digestive system), with 8,309 dialogues. Furthermore, we build benchmarking baselines on MidMed and propose an instruction-guiding medical dialogue generation framework, termed InsMed, to handle mixed-type dialogues. Experimental results show the effectiveness of InsMed.",
}

Most medical dialogue systems assume that patients have clear goals (seeking a diagnosis, medicine querying, etc.) before medical consultation. However, in many real situations, due to the lack of medical knowledge, it is usually difficult for patients to determine clear goals with all necessary slots. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct medical consultation dialogue systems to help patients clarify their goals. For further study, we create a novel human-to-human mixed-type medical consultation dialogue corpus, termed MidMed, covering four dialogue types: task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, recommendation, QA, and chitchat. MidMed covers four departments (otorhinolaryngology, ophthalmology, skin, and digestive system), with 8,309 dialogues. Furthermore, we build benchmarking baselines on MidMed and propose an instruction-guiding medical dialogue generation framework, termed InsMed, to handle mixed-type dialogues. Experimental results show the effectiveness of InsMed.
Shi, Xiaoming Liu, Zeming Wang, Chuan Leng, Haitao Xue, Kui Zhang, Xiaofan Zhang, Shaoting
MidMed: Towards Mixed-Type Dialogues for Medical Consultation