Modeling Dialogue in Conversational Cognitive Health Screening Interviews

Shahla Farzana, Mina Valizadeh, Natalie Parde


Abstract
Automating straightforward clinical tasks can reduce workload for healthcare professionals, increase accessibility for geographically-isolated patients, and alleviate some of the economic burdens associated with healthcare. A variety of preliminary screening procedures are potentially suitable for automation, and one such domain that has remained underexplored to date is that of structured clinical interviews. A task-specific dialogue agent is needed to automate the collection of conversational speech for further (either manual or automated) analysis, and to build such an agent, a dialogue manager must be trained to respond to patient utterances in a manner similar to a human interviewer. To facilitate the development of such an agent, we propose an annotation schema for assigning dialogue act labels to utterances in patient-interviewer conversations collected as part of a clinically-validated cognitive health screening task. We build a labeled corpus using the schema, and show that it is characterized by high inter-annotator agreement. We establish a benchmark dialogue act classification model for the corpus, thereby providing a proof of concept for the proposed annotation schema. The resulting dialogue act corpus is the first such corpus specifically designed to facilitate automated cognitive health screening, and lays the groundwork for future exploration in this area.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.147
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1167–1177
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.147
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shahla Farzana, Mina Valizadeh, and Natalie Parde. 2020. Modeling Dialogue in Conversational Cognitive Health Screening Interviews. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1167–1177, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Dialogue in Conversational Cognitive Health Screening Interviews (Farzana et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2020.lrec-1.147.pdf