A Graph Neural Network Approach for Intent Classification and Linguistic Analysis of Expert-Authored Maternal Health Dialogue in Low-Resource Uganda
# PrenatalGNN
**A GNN + LLM knowledge-graph framework for AI-assisted prenatal SMS triage in Uganda.**
> Every year, thousands of preventable maternal deaths in Uganda trace back
> to one root cause: a danger sign reported by SMS that reached a clinician
> hours too late. PrenatalGNN is a research framework for closing that gap
> — combining a knowledge-graph-augmented GNN classifier with clinical
> validation, fairness auditing, and Luganda-language support, so that
> "I'm bleeding and in pain" gets triaged in minutes, not hours.
## Why this project exists
Maternal health chatbots and USSD/SMS triage lines are increasingly common
across East Africa, but most publish only headline accuracy numbers. This
project asks the harder questions a clinical deployment actually needs
answered:
- **Does the AI change outcomes**, not just classify messages correctly?
(→ propensity-score-matched causal analysis)
- **Is it faster than the status quo**, and by how much for the cases that
matter most? (→ AI-vs-human triage simulation)
- **Is it fair** across Uganda's regions, not just accurate on average?
(→ per-region fairness audit with equalized odds / disparate impact)
- **Does it survive contact with real SMS**, i.e. noisy text and
code-switching into Luganda? (→ noise-robustness and zero-shot
multilingual evaluation)
- **What does the medical knowledge graph actually contribute**, versus a
model with no domain grounding? (→ ablation study)
PrenatalGNN packages all five analyses into one reproducible pipeline, with
every stage runnable standalone.
## Pipeline overview
The framework implements the six-stage pipeline above end to end:
1. **Input Data** — load a real de-identified SMS/USSD export, or generate a
realistic synthetic dataset (10 intent classes, clinical risk levels,
10% Luganda code-switching) with zero setup.
2. **Data Preprocessing** — column inference/mapping, encoding auto-detection,
train/test split, standardization.
3. **Exploratory Data Analysi …