Simple Data Augmentation Techniques for Chinese Disease Normalization

Disease name normalization is an important task in the medical domain. It classifies disease names written in various formats into standardized names, serving as a fundamental component in smart healthcare systems for various disease-related functions. Nevertheless, the most significant obstacle to existing disease name normalization systems is the severe shortage of training data. Consequently, we present a novel data augmentation approach that includes a series of data augmentation techniques and some supporting modules to help mitigate the problem. Our proposed methods rely on the Structural Invariance property of disease names and the Hierarchy property of the disease classification system. The goal is to equip the models with extensive understanding of the disease names and the hierarchical structure of the disease name classification system. Through extensive experimentation, we illustrate that our proposed approach exhibits significant performance improvements across various baseline models and training objectives, particularly in scenarios with limited training data.