Novel Computational Linguistic Measures, Dialogue System and the\n Development of SOPHIE: Standardized Online Patient for Healthcare Interaction\n Education

In this paper, we describe the iterative participatory design of SOPHIE, an\nonline virtual patient for feedback-based practice of sensitive\npatient-physician conversations, and discuss an initial qualitative evaluation\nof the system by professional end users. The design of SOPHIE was motivated\nfrom a computational linguistic analysis of the transcripts of 383\npatient-physician conversations from an essential office visit of late stage\ncancer patients with their oncologists. We developed methods for the automatic\ndetection of two behavioral paradigms, lecturing and positive language usage\npatterns (sentiment trajectory of conversation), that are shown to be\nsignificantly associated with patient prognosis understanding. These automated\nmetrics associated with effective communication were incorporated into SOPHIE,\nand a pilot user study identified that SOPHIE was favorably reviewed by a user\ngroup of practicing physicians.\n