  Medical dialogue generation relies on natural language generation techniques
to enable online medical consultations. Recently, the widespread adoption of
large-scale models in the field of natural language processing has facilitated
rapid advancements in this technology. Existing medical dialogue models are
mostly based on BERT and pre-trained on English corpora, but there is a lack of
high-performing models on the task of Chinese medical dialogue generation. To
solve the above problem, this paper proposes CMed-GPT, which is the GPT
pre-training language model based on Chinese medical domain text. The model is
available in two versions, namely, base and large, with corresponding
perplexity values of 8.64 and 8.01. Additionally, we incorporate lexical and
entity embeddings into the dialogue text in a uniform manner to meet the
requirements of downstream dialogue generation tasks. By applying both
fine-tuning and p-tuning to CMed-GPT, we lowered the PPL from 8.44 to 7.35.
This study not only confirms the exceptional performance of the CMed-GPT model
in generating Chinese biomedical text but also highlights the advantages of
p-tuning over traditional fine-tuning with prefix prompts. Furthermore, we
validate the significance of incorporating external information in medical
dialogue generation, which enhances the quality of dialogue generation.
