MedNgage: A Dataset for Understanding Engagement in Patient-Nurse Conversations

Yan Wang, Heidi Donovan, Sabit Hassan, Malihe Alikhani


Abstract
Patients who effectively manage their symptoms often demonstrate higher levels of engagement in conversations and interventions with healthcare practitioners. This engagement is multifaceted, encompassing cognitive and social dimensions. Consequently, it is crucial for AI systems to understand the engagement in natural conversations between patients and practitioners to better contribute toward patient care. In this paper, we present a novel dataset (MedNgage), which consists of patient-nurse conversations about cancer symptom management. We manually annotate the dataset with a novel framework of categories of patient engagement from two different angles, namely: i) socio-affective engagement (3.1K spans), and ii) cognitive engagement (1.8K spans). Through statistical analysis of the data that is annotated using our framework, we show a positive correlation between patient symptom management outcomes and their engagement in conversations. Additionally, we demonstrate that pre-trained transformer models fine-tuned on our dataset can reliably predict engagement categories in patient-nurse conversations. Lastly, we use LIME (Ribeiro et al., 2016) to analyze the underlying challenges of the tasks that state-of-the-art transformer models encounter. The de-identified data is available for research purposes upon request.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.282
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4613–4630
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.282
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.282
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yan Wang, Heidi Donovan, Sabit Hassan, and Malihe Alikhani. 2023. MedNgage: A Dataset for Understanding Engagement in Patient-Nurse Conversations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 4613–4630, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MedNgage: A Dataset for Understanding Engagement in Patient-Nurse Conversations (Wang et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.282.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.282.mp4