A French OSCE Dialogue Dataset and Controllable Virtual Patient System for Clinical Training

Doria Bonzi, Tom Bourgeade, Fabrice Lefèvre, Irina Illina


Abstract
The clinical and communication skills of medical students are commonly assessed through Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), which consist of brief scenario-driven simulations of doctor-patient interactions. However, training is often limited by the low availability of human standardized patients, motivating the development of realistic virtual patients (VPs). To address this gap, we introduce a French OSCE dialogue dataset comprising 240 real student–patient training interactions. We build upon it a controllable LLM-based pipeline to generate synthetic OSCE dialogues. The pipeline integrates modular components, such as retrieval-based grounding and a reflection loop, to ensure patient fidelity, coherence, and realism. Additionally, we propose a multi-level evaluation framework assessing patient simulation quality, student performance, and linguistic quality, using an LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Experiments suggest that controllability modules generally improve patient fidelity and student evaluation consistency. Finally, we also implement an interactive prototype in which students can practice with a VP and receive automatic feedback.
Anthology ID:
2026.sigdial-1.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2026
Address:
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Editors:
Jinho D. Choi, Yun-Nung Chen, Kotaro Funakoshi, Ali Emami
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
357–374
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.25/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Doria Bonzi, Tom Bourgeade, Fabrice Lefèvre, and Irina Illina. 2026. A French OSCE Dialogue Dataset and Controllable Virtual Patient System for Clinical Training. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 357–374, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A French OSCE Dialogue Dataset and Controllable Virtual Patient System for Clinical Training (Bonzi et al., SIGDIAL 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.25.pdf