A Hybrid Medical Text Classification Framework: Integrating Attentive Rule Construction and Neural Network

Abstract The main objective of this work is to improve the quality and transparency of the medical text classification solutions. Conventional text classification methods provide users with only a restricted mechanism (based on frequency) for selecting features. In this paper, a three-stage hybrid method combining the threshold-gated attentive bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (ABLSTM) and the regular expression based classifier is proposed for medical text classification tasks. The bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture with an attention layer allows the network to weigh words according to their perceived importance and focus on crucial parts of a sentence. Feature words (or keywords) extracted by ABLSTM model are utilized to guide the regular expression rule construction. Our proposed approach leverages the advantages of both the interpretability of rule-based algorithms and the computational power of deep learning approaches for a production-ready scenario. Experimental results on real-world medical online query data clearly validate the superiority of our system in selecting domain-specific and topic-related features. Results show that the proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 0.89 and an F 1 -score of 0.92 respectively. Furthermore, our experimentation also illustrates the versatility of regular expressions as a user-level tool for focusing on desired patterns and providing interpretable solutions for human modification.