Identifying Similar Questions in the Medical Domain Using a Fine-tuned Siamese-BERT Model

A large number of people search about their health related problems on the web. However, the number of sites with qualified and verified people answering their queries is quite low in comparison to the number of questions being put up. The rate of queries being searched on such sites has further increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main reason people find it difficult to find solutions to their queries is due to ineffective identification of semantically similar questions in the medical domain. For most cases, answers to the queries people ask would be present, the only caveat being the question may be present in a different form than the one asked by the particular user. In this research, we propose a Siamese-based BERT model to detect similar questions using a fine-tuning approach. The network is fine-tuned with medical question-answer pairs and then with question-question pairs to get a better question similarity prediction.