# Terminology-aware Medical Dialogue Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15551 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15551/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Knowledge-Routed Relational Dialogue System for Automatic Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10623/) (2019)
- [MedDG: An Entity-Centric Medical Consultation Dataset for Entity-Aware Medical Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07497/) (2020)
- [EtriCA: Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation Augmented by Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12463/) (2022)
- [Recent Advances in Neural Text Generation: A Task-Agnostic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03047/) (2022)
- [NGEP: A Graph-based Event Planning Framework for Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10602/) (2022)
- [Fast and Scalable Dialogue State Tracking with Explicit Modular Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10663/) (2020)
- [Improving Chinese Story Generation via Awareness of Syntactic Dependencies and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10618/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [TwistList: Resources and Baselines for Tongue Twister Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03457/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Dialogue Generation via Dynamic Graph Knowledge Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16195/) (2023)
- [Improving Medical Dialogue Generation with Abstract Meaning Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10608/) (2023)
- [CADGE: Context-Aware Dialogue Generation Enhanced with Graph-Structured Knowledge Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06294/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogues in Latent Space with Next Sentence Prediction and Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16967/) (2023)
- [A Cross-Attention Augmented Model for Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11271/) (2023)
- [Theoretical Investigations and Practical Enhancements on Tail Task Risk Minimization in Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22788/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuning DialoGPT on Common Diseases in Rural Nepal for Medical Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00514/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical dialogue generation aims to generate responses according to a history of dialogue turns between doctors and patients. Unlike open-domain dialogue generation, this requires background knowledge specific to the medical domain. Existing generative frameworks for medical dialogue generation fall short of incorporating domain-specific knowledge, especially with regard to medical terminology. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to improve medical dialogue generation by considering features centered on domain-specific terminology. We leverage an attention mechanism to incorporate terminologically centred features, and fill in the semantic gap between medical background knowledge and common utterances by enforcing language models to learn terminology representations with an auxiliary terminology recognition task. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, in which our proposed framework outperforms SOTA language models. Additionally, we provide a new dataset with medical terminology annotations to support the research on medical dialogue generation. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/tangg555/meddialog.