There has been significant progress in dialogue systems research. However, dialogue systems research in the healthcare domain is still in its infancy. In this paper, we analyse recent studies and outline three building blocks of a task-oriented dialogue system in the healthcare domain: i) privacy-preserving data collection; ii) medical knowledge-grounded dialogue management; and iii) human-centric evaluations. To this end, we propose a framework for developing a dialogue system and show preliminary results of simulated dialogue data generation by utilising expert knowledge and crowd-sourcing.

Extracting temporal information is critical to process health-related text. Temporal information extraction is a challenging task for language models because it requires processing both texts and numbers. Moreover, the fundamental challenge is how to obtain a large-scale training dataset. To address this, we propose a synthetic data generation algorithm. Also, we propose a novel multi-task temporal information extraction model and investigate whether multi-task learning can contribute to performance improvement by exploiting additional training signals with the existing training data. For experiments, we collected a custom dataset containing unstructured texts with temporal information of sleep-related activities. Experimental results show that utilising synthetic data can improve the performance when the augmentation factor is 3. The results also show that when multi-task learning is used with an appropriate amount of synthetic data, the performance can significantly improve from 82. to 88.6 and from 83.9 to 91.9 regarding micro-and macro-average exact match scores of normalised time prediction, respectively.

This paper explores how Dutch diary fragments, written by family coaches in the social sector, can be analysed automatically using machine learning techniques to quantitatively measure the impact of social coaching. The focus lays on two tasks: determining which sentiment a fragment contains (sentiment analysis) and investigating which fundamental social rights (education, employment, legal aid, etc.) are addressed in the fragment. To train and test the new algorithms, a dataset consisting of 1715 Dutch diary fragments is used. These fragments are manually labelled on sentiment and on the applicable fundamental social rights. The sentiment analysis models were trained to classify the fragments into three classes: negative, neutral or positive. Fine-tuning the Dutch pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERTje) (de Vries et al., 2019) language model surpassed the more classic algorithms by correctly classifying 79.6% of the fragments on the sentiment analysis, which is considered as a good result. This technique also achieved the best results in the identification of the fundamental rights, where for every fragment the three most likely fundamental rights were given as output. In this way, 93% of the present fundamental rights were correctly recognised. To our knowledge, we are the first to try to extract social rights from written text with the help of Natural Language Processing techniques.