Background: To provide satisfying answers, medical QA system has to understand the intentions of the users’ questions precisely. For medical intent classification, it requires high-quality datasets to train a deep-learning approach in a supervised way. Currently, there is no public dataset for Chinese medical intent classification, and the datasets of other fields are not applicable to the medical QA system. To solve this problem, we construct a Chinese medical intent dataset (CMID) using the questions from medical QA websites. On this basis, we compare four intent classification models on CMID using a case study. Methods: The questions in CMID are obtained from several medical QA websites. The intent annotation standard is developed by the medical experts, which includes four types and 36 subtypes of users’ intents. Besides the intent label, CMID also provides two types of additional information, including word segmentation and named entity. We use the crowdsourcing way to annotate the intent information for each Chinese medical question. Word segmentation and named entities are obtained using the Jieba and a well-trained Lattice-LSTM model. We loaded a Chinese medical dictionary consisting of 530,000 for word segmentation to obtain a more accurate result. We also select four popular deep learning-based models and compare their performances of intent classification on CMID. Results: The final CMID contains 12,000 Chinese medical questions and is organized in JSON format. Each question is labeled the intention, word segmentation, and named entity information. The information about question length, number of entities, and are also detailed analyzed. Among Fast Text, TextCNN, TextRNN, and TextGCN, Fast Text and TextCNN models have achieved the best results in four types and 36 subtypes intent classification, respectively. Conclusions: In this work, we provide a dataset for Chinese medical intent classification, which can be used in medical QA and related fields. We performed an intent classification task on the CMID. In addition, we also did some analysis on the content of the dataset.

Previous works trained the Transformer and its variants end-to-end and achieved remarkable translation performance when there are huge parallel sentences available. However, these models suffer from the data scarcity problem in low-resource machine translation tasks. To deal with the mismatch problem between the big model capacity of the Transformer and the small parallel training data set, this paper adds the BERT supervision on the latent representation between the encoder and the decoder of the Transformer and designs a multi-step training algorithm to boost the Transformer on such a basis. The algorithm includes three stages: (1) encoder training, (2) decoder training, and (3) joint optimization. We introduce the BERT of the target language in the encoder and the decoder training and alleviate the data starvation problem of the Transformer. After the training stage, the BERT will not further attend the inference section explicitly. Another merit of our training algorithm is that it can further enhance the Transformer in the task where there are limited parallel sentence pairs but large amounts of monolingual corpus of the target language. The evaluation results on six low-resource translation tasks suggest that the Transformer trained by our algorithm significantly outperforms the baselines which were trained end-to-end in previous works.

The great challenge of handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) is the complex structures of the expressions, which are directly related to the symbol spatial positions. Existing HMER methods typically employ attention mechanisms in the decoder of their models to implicitly perceive the symbol positions, or employ symbol counting and tree-based strategies to model the symbol spatial relation. However, these methods still cannot effectively capture the structural information of formulas, thus negatively impacting the symbol decoding in HMER. To deal with this problem and enhance the HMER performance, this paper proposes a novel auxiliary task, namely predicting the symbol spatial distribution map of handwritten expression images. On such basis, this paper designs a symbol spatial-aware network (SSAN) for this task, which is jointly optimized with the HMER model. Specifically, considering the similarity of the symbol spatial positions between the handwritten mathematical expression images and their corresponding printed templates, we obtain the symbol spatial distribution map by first generating printed templates from LaTeX ground-truth for handwritten formula images and then replacing the connected components of printed templates with 2D Gaussian distribution maps of the same size. Meanwhile, due to the loose alignment of the symbol spatial positions between handwritten and printed formula images, and misclassification of similar symbols, we further propose a coarse-to-fine alignment strategy and an attention-guided symbol masking strategy in SSAN to tackle these issues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SSAN significantly improves the recognition performance of the HMER models, and the proposed auxiliary tasks are more effective in enhancing HMER performance than existing auxiliary tasks.