Building an Arabic Dialectal Diagnostic Dataset for Healthcare

Abstract

Accurate diagnosis of patient conditions becomes challenging for medical practitioners in urban metropolitan cities. A variety of languages and spoken dialects impedes the diagnosis achieved through the exploratory journey a medical practitioner and patient go through. Natural language processing has been used in well-known applications, such as Google Translate, as a solution to reduce language barriers. Languages typically encountered in these applications provide the most commonly known, used or standardized dialect. The Arabic language can benefit from the common dialect, which is available in such applications. However, given the diversity of dialects in Arabic in the healthcare domain, there is a risk associated with incorrect interpretation of a dialect, which can impact the diagnosis or treatment of patients. Arabic language dialect corpuses published in recent research work can be applied to rule-based natural language applications. Our study aims to develop an approach to support medical practitioners by ensuring that the diagnosis is not impeded based on the misinterpretation of patient responses. Our initial approach reported in this work adopts the methods used by practitioners in the diagnosis carried out within the scope of the Emirati and Egyptian Arabic dialects. In this paper, we develop and provide a public Arabic Dialect Dataset (ADD), which is a corpus of audio samples related to healthcare. In order to train machine learning models, the dataset development is designed with multi-class labelling. Our work indicates that there is a clear risk of bias in datasets, which may come about when a large number of classes do not have enough training samples. Our crowd sourcing solution presented in this work may be an approach to overcome the sourcing of audio samples. Models trained with this dataset may be used to support the diagnosis made by medical practitioners.