Towards Enhancing Health Coaching Dialogue in Low-Resource Settings
Yue Zhou, Barbara Di Eugenio, Brian Ziebart, Lisa Sharp, Bing Liu, Ben Gerber, Nikolaos Agadakos, Shweta Yadav
Abstract
Health coaching helps patients identify and accomplish lifestyle-related goals, effectively improving the control of chronic diseases and mitigating mental health conditions. However, health coaching is cost-prohibitive due to its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature. In this paper, we propose to build a dialogue system that converses with the patients, helps them create and accomplish specific goals, and can address their emotions with empathy. However, building such a system is challenging since real-world health coaching datasets are limited and empathy is subtle. Thus, we propose a modularized health coaching dialogue with simplified NLU and NLG frameworks combined with mechanism-conditioned empathetic response generation. Through automatic and human evaluation, we show that our system generates more empathetic, fluent, and coherent responses and outperforms the state-of-the-art in NLU tasks while requiring less annotation. We view our approach as a key step towards building automated and more accessible health coaching systems.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.coling-1.58
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- October
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
- Venue:
- COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- International Committee on Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 694–706
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.58
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yue Zhou, Barbara Di Eugenio, Brian Ziebart, Lisa Sharp, Bing Liu, Ben Gerber, Nikolaos Agadakos, and Shweta Yadav. 2022. Towards Enhancing Health Coaching Dialogue in Low-Resource Settings. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 694–706, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Towards Enhancing Health Coaching Dialogue in Low-Resource Settings (Zhou et al., COLING 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl-24-ws-corrections/2022.coling-1.58.pdf