  Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a natural, safe, and effective therapy
that has spread and been applied worldwide. The unique TCM diagnosis and
treatment system requires a comprehensive analysis of a patient's symptoms
hidden in the clinical record written in free text. Prior studies have shown
that this system can be informationized and intelligentized with the aid of
artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as natural language processing
(NLP). However, existing datasets are not of sufficient quality nor quantity to
support the further development of data-driven AI technology in TCM. Therefore,
in this paper, we focus on the core task of the TCM diagnosis and treatment
system -- syndrome differentiation (SD) -- and we introduce the first public
large-scale dataset for SD, called TCM-SD. Our dataset contains 54,152
real-world clinical records covering 148 syndromes. Furthermore, we collect a
large-scale unlabelled textual corpus in the field of TCM and propose a
domain-specific pre-trained language model, called ZY-BERT. We conducted
experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance
baseline, reveal various challenges in SD, and prove the potential of
domain-specific pre-trained language model. Our study and analysis reveal
opportunities for incorporating computer science and linguistics knowledge to
explore the empirical validity of TCM theories.
