Deep learning for Arabic healthcare: MedicalBot

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare services, particularly remote and automated healthcare consultations, have gained increased attention. Medical bots, which provide medical advice and support, are becoming increasingly popular. They offer numerous benefits, including 24/7 access to medical counseling, reduced appointment wait times by providing quick answers to common questions or concerns, and cost savings associated with fewer visits or tests required for diagnosis and treatment plans. The success of medical bots depends on the quality of their learning, which in turn depends on the appropriate corpus within the domain of interest. Arabic is one of the most commonly used languages for sharing users’ internet content. However, implementing medical bots in Arabic faces several challenges, including the language’s morphological composition, the diversity of dialects, and the need for an appropriate and large enough corpus in the medical domain. To address this gap, this paper introduces the largest Arabic Healthcare Q &A dataset, called MAQA, consisting of over 430,000 questions distributed across 20 medical specializations. Furthermore, this paper adopts three deep learning models, namely LSTM, Bi-LSTM, and Transformers, for experimenting and benchmarking the proposed corpus MAQA. The experimental results demonstrate that the recent Transformer model outperforms the traditional deep learning models, achieving an average cosine similarity of 80.81% and a BLeU score of 58%.