Medical dialogue systems are promising in assisting in telemedicine to increase access to healthcare services, improve the quality of patient care, and reduce medical costs. To facilitate the research and development of medical dialogue systems, we build large-scale medical dialogue datasets -MedDialog, which contain 1) a Chinese dataset with 3.4 million conversations between patients and doctors, 11.3 million utterances, 660.2 million tokens, covering 172 specialties of diseases, and 2) an English dataset with 0.26 million conversations, 0.51 million utterances, 44.53 million tokens, covering 96 specialties of diseases. To our best knowledge, MedDialog is the largest medical dialogue dataset to date. We pretrain several dialogue generation models on the Chinese MedDialog dataset, including Transformer, GPT, BERT-GPT, and compare their performance. It is shown that models trained on MedDialog are able to generate clinically correct and human-like medical dialogues. We also study the transferability of models trained on MedDialog to lowresource medical dialogue generation tasks. It is shown that via transfer learning which finetunes the models pretrained on MedDialog, the performance on medical dialogue generation tasks with small datasets can be greatly improved, as shown in human evaluation and automatic evaluation.

The Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is to determine judgment results based on the fact descriptions of the cases. LJP usually consists of multiple subtasks, such as applicable law articles prediction, charges prediction, and the term of the penalty prediction. These multiple subtasks have topological dependencies, the results of which affect and verify each other. However, existing methods use dependencies of results among multiple subtasks inefficiently. Moreover, for cases with similar descriptions but different penalties, current methods cannot predict accurately because the word collocation information is ignored. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Perspective Bi-Feedback Network with the Word Collocation Attention mechanism based on the topology structure among subtasks. Specifically, we design a multi-perspective forward prediction and backward verification framework to utilize result dependencies among multiple subtasks effectively. To distinguish cases with similar descriptions but different penalties, we integrate word collocations features of fact descriptions into the network via an attention mechanism. The experimental results show our model achieves significant improvements over baselines on all prediction tasks.

Comprehensive document encoding and salient information selection are two major difficulties for generating summaries with adequate salient information. To tackle the above difficulties, we propose a Transformerbased encoder-decoder framework with two novel extensions for abstractive document summarization. Specifically, (1) to encode the documents comprehensively, we design a focus-attention mechanism and incorporate it into the encoder. This mechanism models a Gaussian focal bias on attention scores to enhance the perception of local context, which contributes to producing salient and informative summaries. (2) To distinguish salient information precisely, we design an independent saliency-selection network which manages the information flow from encoder to decoder. This network effectively reduces the influences of secondary information on the generated summaries. Experimental results on the popular CNN/Daily Mail benchmark demonstrate that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines on the ROUGE metrics.

Spoken language understanding (SLU), which is a core component of the task-oriented dialogue system, has made substantial progress in the research of single-turn dialogue. However, the performance in multi-turn dialogue is still not satisfactory in the sense that the existing multi-turn SLU methods have low portability and compatibility for other single-turn SLU models. Further, existing multi-turn SLU methods do not exploit the historical predicted results when predicting the current utterance, which wastes helpful information. To gap those shortcomings, in this paper, we propose a novel Resultbased Portable Framework for SLU (RPFSLU). RPFSLU allows most existing single-turn SLU models to obtain the contextual information from multi-turn dialogues and takes full advantage of predicted results in the dialogue history during the current prediction. Experimental results on the public dataset KVRET have shown that all SLU models in baselines acquire enhancement by RPFSLU on multi-turn SLU tasks.