Semantic Similarity To Improve Question Understanding in a Virtual Patient

Abstract--In medicine, a communicating virtual patient or doctor allows students to train in medical diagnosis and dev elop skills to conduct a medical consultation. In this paper, we describe a conversational virtual standardized patient sy stem to allow medical students to simulate a diagnosis strategy o f an abdominal surgical emergency. We exploited the semantic properties captured by distributed word representations t o search for similar questions in the virtual patient dialogue syste m. We created two dialogue systems that were evaluated on dataset s collected during tests with students. The first system based on handcrafted rules obtains 92.29% as F 1-score on the studied clinical case while the second system that combines rules an d semantic similarity achieves 94.88%. It represents an error reduction of 9.70% as compared to the rules-only-based system. The medical diagnosis practice is traditionally bedside taught. Theoretical courses are supplemented by internshi ps in hospital services. The medical student observes the practi ce of doctors and interns and practices himself under their contr ol. This type of learning has the disadvantage to confront immediately the medical student with complex situations withou t practical training (technical and human) beforehand.