A hybrid medical text classification framework: integrating attentive rule construction and neural network

Li, Xiang, Cui, Menglin, Li, Jingpeng, Bai, Ruibin, Lu, Zheng and Aickelin, Uwe (2021) A hybrid medical text classification framework: integrating attentive rule construction and neural network. Neurocomputing, 443 . pp. 345-355. ISSN 09252312

[img]
Preview
PDF - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Available under Licence Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (951kB) | Preview

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to improve the quality and transparency of the medical text classification solutions. Conventional text classification methods provide users with only a restricted mechanism (based on frequency) for selecting features. In this paper, a three-stage hybrid method combining the threshold-gated attentive bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (ABLSTM) and the regular expression based classifier is proposed for medical text classification tasks. The bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture with an attention layer allows the network to weigh words according to their perceived importance and focus on crucial parts of a sentence. Feature words (or keywords) extracted by ABLSTM model are utilized to guide the regular expression rule construction. Our proposed approach leverages the advantages of both the interpretability of rule-based algorithms and the computational power of deep learning approaches for a production-ready scenario. Experimental results on real-world medical online query data clearly validate the superiority of our system in selecting domain-specific and topic-related features. Results show that the proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 0.89 and an F1-score of 0.92 respectively. Furthermore, our experimentation also illustrates the versatility of regular expressions as a user-level tool for focusing on desired patterns and providing interpretable solutions for human modification.

Item Type: Article
Keywords: hybrid system; deep learning; attention mechanism; text classification
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham Ningbo China > Faculty of Science and Engineering > School of Computer Science
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2021.02.069
Depositing User: Wang, Danni
Date Deposited: 12 May 2021 02:54
Last Modified: 12 May 2021 02:54
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/65138

Actions (Archive Staff Only)

Edit View Edit View