TCM-SD: A Benchmark for Probing Syndrome Differentiation via Natural Language Processing

Mucheng Ren, Heyan Huang, Yuxiang Zhou, Qianwen Cao, Yuan Bu, Yang Gao

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a natural, safe, and effective therapy that has spread and been applied worldwide. The unique TCM diagnosis and treatment system requires a comprehensive analysis of a patient's symptoms hidden in the clinical record written in free text. Prior studies have shown that this system can be informationized and intelligentized with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as natural language processing (NLP). However, existing datasets are not of sufficient quality nor quantity to support the further development of data-driven AI technology in TCM. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the core task of the TCM diagnosis and treatment system-syndrome differentiation (SD)-and we introduce the first public large-scale benchmark for SD, called TCM-SD. Our benchmark contains 54,152 real-world clinical records covering 148 syndromes. Furthermore, we collect a large-scale unlabelled textual corpus in the field of TCM and propose a domain-specific pre-trained language model, called ZY-BERT. We conducted experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance baseline, reveal various challenges in SD, and prove the potential of domain-specific pre-trained language model. Our study and analysis reveal opportunities for incorporating computer science and linguistics knowledge to explore the empirical validity of TCM theories.

Original languageEnglish
Pages908-920
Number of pages13
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event21st Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistic, CCL 2022 - Nanchang, China
Duration: 14 Oct 202216 Oct 2022

Conference

Conference21st Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistic, CCL 2022
Country/TerritoryChina
CityNanchang
Period14/10/2216/10/22

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