Breastfeeding and Maternity experts are a scarce resource and engaging in a conversation with mothers on such a sensitive topic is a time-consuming effort. We present our journey and rationale in assisting experts to answer queries about Breastfeeding and Maternity topics from users, mainly mothers. We started by developing a RAG approach to response generation where the generated response is made available to the expert who has the option to draft an answer using the generated text or to answer from scratch. This was the start of an ongoing effort to develop a pipeline of AI/NLP-based functionalities to help experts understand user queries and craft their responses.

The Stanford Coreference Resolution System (StCR) is a multi-pass, rule-based system that scored best in the CoNLL 2011 shared task on general discourse coreference resolution. We describe how the StCR has been adapted to the specific domain of patents and give some cues on how it can be adapted to other domains. We present a linguistic analysis of the patent domain and how we were able to adapt the rules to the domain and to expand coreferences with some lexical chains. A comparative evaluation shows an improvement of the coreference resolution system, denoting that (i) StCR is a valuable tool across different text genres; (ii) specialized discourse NLP may significantly benefit from general discourse NLP research.