An Improved Model for Medical Forum Question Classification Based on CNN and BiLSTM

Abstract

Question Classification (QC) is the fundamental task for Question Answering Systems (QASs) implementation, and is a vital task, as it helps in identifying the question category. It plays a big role in predicting the answer to a question while building a QAS. However, classifying medical questions is still a challenging task due to the complexity of medical terms. Many researchers have proposed different techniques to solve these problems, but some of these problems remain partially solved or unsolved. With the help of deep learning technology, various text-processing problems have become much easier to solve. In this paper, an improved deep learning-based model for Medical Forum Question Classification (MFQC) is proposed to classify medical questions. In the proposed model, feature representation is performed using Word2Vec, which is a word embedding model. Additionally, the features are extracted from the word embedding layer based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Finally, a Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) network is used to classify the extracted features. The BiLSTM model analyzes the target information of the representation and then outputs the question category via a SoftMax layer. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance by effectively capturing semantic and syntactic features from the input questions. We evaluate the proposed CNN-BiLSTM model on two benchmark datasets and compare its performance with existing methods, demonstrating its superiority in accurately categorizing medical forum questions.