A Knowledge-Enhanced Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning-Based Dialogue System for Automatic Disease Diagnosis

Deep Reinforcement Learning is a key technology for the diagnosis-oriented medical dialogue system, determining the type of disease according to the patient’s utterances. The existing dialogue models for disease diagnosis cannot achieve good performance due to the large number of symptoms and diseases. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-enhanced hierarchical reinforcement learning model for strategy learning in the medical dialogue system for disease diagnosis. Our hierarchical strategy alleviates the problem of a large action space in reinforcement learning. In addition, the knowledge enhancement module integrates a learnable disease–symptom relationship matrix and medical knowledge graph into the hierarchical strategy for higher diagnosis success rate. Our proposed model has been proved to be effective on a medical dialogue dataset for automatic disease diagnosis.