Exploration on Generating Traditional Chinese Medicine Prescription from Symptoms with an End-to-End method

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is an influential form of medical treatment in China and surrounding areas. In this paper, we propose a TCM prescription generation task that aims to automatically generate a herbal medicine prescription based on textual symptom descriptions. Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model has been successful in dealing with conditional sequence generation tasks like dialogue generation. We explore a potential end-to-end solution to the TCM prescription generation task using seq2seq models. However, experiments show that directly applying seq2seq model leads to unfruitful results due to the severe repetition problem. To solve the problem, we propose a novel architecture for the decoder with masking and coverage mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in diversifying the outputs, which significantly improves the F1 score by nearly 10 points (8.34 on test set 1 and 10.23 on test set 2).