Fast Prototyping a Dialogue Comprehension System for Nurse-Patient Conversations on Symptom Monitoring
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Data for human-human spoken dialogues for research and development are currently very limited in quantity, variety, and sources; such data is even scarcer in healthcare. In this work, we investigate fast prototyping of a dialogue comprehension system by leveraging on minimal nurse-to-patient conversations. We propose a framework inspired by nurse-initiated clinical symptom monitoring conversations to construct a simulated human-human dialogue dataset, embodying linguistic characteristics of spoken interactions like thinking aloud, self-contradiction, and topic drift. We then adapt an established bidirectional attention pointer network on this simulated dataset, achieving more than 80 nurse-to-patient conversations. The ability to automatically comprehend conversations in the healthcare domain by exploiting only limited data has implications for improving clinical workflows with automatic summarization of consultations, red flag symptom detection and triaging capabilities. Our prototype demonstrates the feasibility for efficient and effective extraction, retrieval and comprehension of symptom checking information discussed in multi-turn human-human spoken conversations.
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