Domain-Relevant Embeddings for Medical Question Similarity

The rate at which medical questions are asked online far exceeds the capacity of qualified people to answer them, and many of these questions are not unique. Identifying same-question pairs could enable questions to be answered more effectively. While many research efforts have focused on the problem of general question similarity for non-medical applications, these approaches do not generalize well to the medical domain, where medical expertise is often required to determine semantic similarity. In this paper, we show how a semi-supervised approach of pre-training a neural network on medical question-answer pairs is a particularly useful intermediate task for the ultimate goal of determining medical question similarity. While other pre-training tasks yield an accuracy below 78.7% on this task, our model achieves an accuracy of 82.6% with the same number of training examples, and an accuracy of 80.0% with a much smaller training set.