  Medical conversations between patients and medical professionals have
implicit functional sections, such as "history taking", "summarization",
"education", and "care plan." In this work, we are interested in learning to
automatically extract these sections. A direct approach would require
collecting large amounts of expert annotations for this task, which is
inherently costly due to the contextual inter-and-intra variability between
these sections. This paper presents an approach that tackles the problem of
learning to classify medical dialogue into functional sections without
requiring a large number of annotations. Our approach combines pseudo-labeling
and human-in-the-loop. First, we bootstrap using weak supervision with
pseudo-labeling to generate dialogue turn-level pseudo-labels and train a
transformer-based model, which is then applied to individual sentences to
create noisy sentence-level labels. Second, we iteratively refine
sentence-level labels using a cluster-based human-in-the-loop approach. Each
iteration requires only a few dozen annotator decisions. We evaluate the
results on an expert-annotated dataset of 100 dialogues and find that while our
models start with 69.5% accuracy, we can iteratively improve it to 82.5%. The
code used to perform all experiments described in this paper can be found here:
https://github.com/curai/curai-research/tree/main/functional-sections.
