Structural and Textual Information Fusion for Symptom and Disease Representation Learning

Online medical consult and offline medical check-in have generated a large amount of health-related data in medical forums and patient records. However, exploiting the user-generated content for orienting patients online and assisting medical checkup offline is nontrivial due to the sparsity of symptom-disease associations. The serious sparsity is caused by the informal/chatty expressions of symptoms in the data.