Human-Human Health Coaching via Text Messages: Corpus, Annotation, and Analysis

Itika Gupta, Barbara Di Eugenio, Brian Ziebart, Aiswarya Baiju, Bing Liu, Ben Gerber, Lisa Sharp, Nadia Nabulsi, Mary Smart


Abstract
Our goal is to develop and deploy a virtual assistant health coach that can help patients set realistic physical activity goals and live a more active lifestyle. Since there is no publicly shared dataset of health coaching dialogues, the first phase of our research focused on data collection. We hired a certified health coach and 28 patients to collect the first round of human-human health coaching interaction which took place via text messages. This resulted in 2853 messages. The data collection phase was followed by conversation analysis to gain insight into the way information exchange takes place between a health coach and a patient. This was formalized using two annotation schemas: one that focuses on the goals the patient is setting and another that models the higher-level structure of the interactions. In this paper, we discuss these schemas and briefly talk about their application for automatically extracting activity goals and annotating the second round of data, collected with different health coaches and patients. Given the resource-intensive nature of data annotation, successfully annotating a new dataset automatically is key to answer the need for high quality, large datasets.
Anthology ID:
2020.sigdial-1.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
1st virtual meeting
Editors:
Olivier Pietquin, Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Casey Kennington, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Koji Inoue, Erik Ekstedt, Stefan Ultes
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
246–256
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.30
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.30
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Itika Gupta, Barbara Di Eugenio, Brian Ziebart, Aiswarya Baiju, Bing Liu, Ben Gerber, Lisa Sharp, Nadia Nabulsi, and Mary Smart. 2020. Human-Human Health Coaching via Text Messages: Corpus, Annotation, and Analysis. In Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 246–256, 1st virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Human-Human Health Coaching via Text Messages: Corpus, Annotation, and Analysis (Gupta et al., SIGDIAL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.30.pdf
Video:
 https://youtube.com/watch?v=1ga22I-NZeA