Medical dialogue generation (MDG) has gained increasing attention due to its substantial practical value. Previous works typically employ a sequence-to-sequence framework to generate medical responses by modeling dialogue context as sequential text with annotated medical entities. While these methods have been successful in generating fluent responses, they fail to provide process explanations of reasoning and require extensive entity annotation. To address these limitations, we propose the method Bootstrap Prompting for Explicit Reasoning in MDG (BP4ER), which explicitly model MDG’s multi-step reasoning process and iteratively enhance this reasoning process. We employ a least-to-most prompting strategy to guide a large language model (LLM) in explicit reasoning, breaking down MDG into simpler sub-questions. These sub-questions build on answers from previous ones. Additionally, we also introduce two distinct bootstrapping techniques for prompting, which autonomously correct errors and facilitate the LLM’s explicit reasoning. This approach eliminates the need for entity annotation and increases the transparency of the MDG process by explicitly generating the intermediate reasoning chain. Experimental results on the two publicly datasets show that BP4ER outperforms state-of-the-art methods across both objective and subjective evaluation.

Adverse drug-drug interactions (DDIs) can compromise the effectiveness of concurrent drug administration, posing a significant challenge in healthcare. As the development of new drugs continues, the potential for unknown adverse effects resulting from DDIs becomes a growing concern. Traditional computational methods for DDI prediction may fail to capture interactions for new drugs due to the lack of knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a new problem setup as zero-shot DDI prediction that deals with the case of new drugs. Leveraging textual information from online databases like DrugBank and PubChem, we propose an innovative approach TextDDI with a language model-based DDI predictor and a reinforcement learning (RL)-based information selector, enabling the selection of concise and pertinent text for accurate DDI prediction on new drugs. Empirical results show the benefits of the proposed approach on several settings including zero-shot and few-shot DDI prediction, and the selected texts are semantically relevant. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zhufq00/DDIs-Prediction.

Knowledge graph (KG) embedding is a fundamental task in natural language processing, and various methods have been proposed to explore semantic patterns in distinctive ways. In this paper, we propose to learn an ensemble by leveraging existing methods in a relation-aware manner. However, exploring these semantics using relation-aware ensemble leads to a much larger search space than general ensemble methods. To address this issue, we propose a divide-search-combine algorithm RelEns-DSC that searches the relation-wise ensemble weights independently. This algorithm has the same computation cost as general ensemble methods but with much better performance. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in efficiently searching relation-aware ensemble weights and achieving state-of-the-art embedding performance. The code is public at https://github.com/LARS-research/RelEns.

While hyper-parameters (HPs) are important for knowledge graph (KG) learning, existing methods fail to search them efficiently. To solve this problem, we first analyze the properties of different HPs and measure the transfer ability from small subgraph to the full graph. Based on the analysis, we propose an efficient two-stage search algorithm KGTuner, which efficiently explores HP configurations on small subgraph at the first stage and transfers the top-performed configurations for fine-tuning on the large full graph at the second stage. Experiments show that our method can consistently find better HPs than the baseline algorithms within the same time budget, which achieves 9.1% average relative improvement for four embedding models on the large-scale KGs in open graph benchmark. Our code is released in https://github.com/AutoML-Research/KGTuner.