In the medical field, we have seen the emergence of health-bots that interact with patients to gather data and track their state. One of the downstream application is automatic questionnaire filling, where the content of the dialog is used to automatically fill a pre-defined medical questionnaire. Previous work has shown that answering questions from the dialog context can successfully be cast as a Natural Language Inference (NLI) task and therefore benefit from current pre-trained NLI models. However, NLI models have mostly been trained on text rather than dialogs, which may have an influence on their performance. In this paper, we study the influence of content transformation and content selection on the questionnaire filling task. Our results demonstrate that dialog pre-processing can significantly improve the performance of zero-shot questionnaire filling models which take health-bots dialogs as input.

We focus on dialog models in the context of clinical studies where the goal is to help gather, in addition to the close information collected based on a questionnaire, serendipitous information that is medically relevant. To promote user engagement and address this dual goal (collecting both a predefined set of data points and more informal information about the state of the patients), we introduce an ensemble model made of three bots: a task-based, a follow-up and a social bot. We introduce a generic method for developing follow-up bots. We compare different ensemble configurations and we show that the combination of the three bots (i) provides a better basis for collecting information than just the information seeking bot and (ii) collects information in a more user-friendly, more efficient manner that an ensemble model combining the information seeking and the social bot.

In clinical studies, chatbots mimicking doctor-patient interactions are used for collecting information about the patient’s health state. Later, this information needs to be processed and structured for the doctor. One way to organize it is by automatically filling the questionnaires from the human-bot conversation. It would help the doctor to spot the possible issues. Since there is no such dataset available for this task and its collection is costly and sensitive, we explore the capacities of state-of-the-art zero-shot models for question answering, textual inference, and text classification. We provide a detailed analysis of the results and propose further directions for clinical questionnaire filling.

A key bottleneck for developing dialog models is the lack of adequate training data. Due to privacy issues, dialog data is even scarcer in the health domain. We propose a novel method for creating dialog corpora which we apply to create doctor-patient interaction data. We use this data to learn both a generation and a hybrid classification/retrieval model and find that the generation model consistently outperforms the hybrid model. We show that our data creation method has several advantages. Not only does it allow for the semi-automatic creation of large quantities of training data. It also provides a natural way of guiding learning and a novel method for assessing the quality of human-machine interactions.